## 1. Biographical Sketch




Alexander Crummell was born free in New York City on March 3, 1819.
His mother, Charity Hicks of Long Island, New York, was also born free,
while his father, Boston Crummell of the Temne people of West Africa,
though originally sold into slavery, eventually became free in
adulthood.




Coinciding with his marriage in 1841 to Sarah Mabitt Elston,
Crummell's career as a public thinker began in earnest. His prominence
as a young intellectual earned him a spot as keynote speaker at the
anti-slavery New York State Convention of Negroes when it met in Albany
in 1840. Despite race-based resistance, he successfully trained for the
priesthood, becoming an Episcopal priest later that same decade. He
studied moral philosophy at Cambridge University under William Whewell,
whose view of moral reasoning as an intuition of necessary moral truths
clearly influenced Crummell's own thought. After taking his bachelor's
degree at Queen's College at Cambridge he resumed his avid
participation in the anti-slavery movement. He subsequently went to
Liberia taking a position as a professor of English and moral
philosophy at Liberia College. His time there was difficult, owing to
personal challenges and political opposition, leading him to return to
the States after the Civil War. His first book was published in New
York, entitled *The Future of Africa* (1862); in it he
solidified much of his early thinking on morality and language. Two
subsequent books, *The Greatness of Christ* (1882) and
*Africa and America* (1891), reflected his more mature thought
on agency and moral change.




His first marriage ended when Elston died in 1878, after which he
married Jennie Simpson in 1880. Late in his life he held a lectureship
at Howard University, though his most enduring contribution to black
American letters was his co-founding of the American Negro Academy in
Washington, DC, in 1897. He helped assemble a number of leading black
intellectuals--including Du Bois and, much later, Locke--to publish
research on problems facing blacks. During its three decades of
existence twenty-two papers appeared. Its disbanding in the 1920s
coincided with the Negro Renaissance in Harlem, the rise of Marcus
Garvey, and the turn to pragmatism and relativism in American
thought.




Crummell died in Red Bank, New Jersey, on September 10, 1898.


## 2. The Problem of Civil Rights




It is obvious that black thinkers during the slavery era would take
rights seriously. American slavery created a class of forced laborers
who possessed few legal rights. And while exceptions existed, the
general path to slavery was through the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
virtually ensuring that slaves were blacks. But rights in any of their
senses--legal, political, or even moral--are far subtler than a casual
observer might grasp. Let us call this the Problem of Civil Rights.



*The Problem of Civil Rights* concerns the question whether
blacks (ought to) enjoy legally established guarantees, together with
corresponding obligations on the State. In the American federal legal
system, this bifurcates--importantly, it turns out--into legal
guarantees by and obligations on the federal government, and those by
and on the several states.




The Civil Rights Problem arises directly for blacks who are slaves.
Given that they are explicitly referred to in the U.S. Constitution in
terms of their status as forced laborers rather than in terms of
membership as citizens in civil society (see Article IV, for instance),
the courts have tended to interpret their legal rights in extremely
narrow terms. It will not be sufficient to merely argue, as some might
be tempted, that the curtailment of legal rights for blacks is
arbitrary and hence unfair. The Constitutional language (and
corresponding intent) is important and not easily dismissed. Moreover,
common law approaches to labor and slave property in international
contexts is complex and sometimes conflicting, so clarity will be
difficult to achieve.




One hope may be to exploit the dualistic character of American
citizenship: inhabitants of individual states are regarded as legal
citizens of that state by the rules and customs of that state, and
(separately) are regarded as citizens of the Union. If a free state
wanted to confer citizenship and the legal rights that accrue to that
status on blacks, it may do so without the interference of federal
statute. (Of course, the same goes for slave states.) As a theoretical
matter Crummell could take the approach that some freedom, if
achievable, could provide a *prima facie* justification for
broad expansion later, leaving to the political strategists the actual
implementation of that expansion.




However, a dizzying series of Supreme Court opinions--the
*Antelope* (1825), the *Amistad* (1841), *Groves v.
Slaughter* (1841), *Prigg v. Pennsylvania* (1842), and
*Strader v. Graham* (1850)--culminating in the Dred Scott
opinion (1856) helped undermine that theoretical approach. These cases
each helped clarify the legal scope of black civil rights, in a way
generally unfavorable to blacks. The rebellion on the *Amistad*
would have led to restoring kidnapped black Africans to their purported
Spanish owners if narrow questions of international treaty obligations
had been read differently. The slave status of blacks was not affected
by their transient residence in a free state, as was held in
*Strader*. Fugitive slaves were presumed to be subject to
return, as the Court held in *Prigg*, despite the somewhat
weaker obligation of states to carry out the requisite extraditions.
The difficulty presented by this series of opinions is well captured by
the Court's interpretation of fugitive slave laws, and shows the
headwind against Crummell.



> 
> 
> It is historically well known that the object in the clause in the
> Constitution of the United States relating to persons owing service and
> labor in one state escaping into other states was to secure to the
> citizens of the slaveholding States the complete right and title of
> ownership in their slaves as property in every State in the Union into
> which they might escape from the State where they were held in
> servitude. The full recognition of this right and title was
> indispensable to the security of this species of property in all the
> slaveholding States, and indeed was so vital to the preservation of
> their domestic interests and institutions that it cannot be doubted
> that it constituted a fundamental article without the adoption of which
> the Union could not have been formed. Its true design was to guard
> against the doctrines and principles prevailing in the non-slaveholding
> States by preventing them from intermeddling with or obstructing or
> abolishing the rights of the owners of slaves. (*Prigg v.
> Pennsylvania*, 41 U.S. (16 Pet.) 539 (1842), at 540)
> 
> 
> 




It is clear that, on this legal interpretation of the Constitution,
the civil rights of blacks are fundamentally incompatible with the
property rights of citizens, as long as slavery is legal anywhere.
Written by Chief Justice Taney on the eve of the Civil War, the
opinion in *Scott v. Sandford* (1856)--the Dred Scott
case--provides a most dramatic version of the narrow
constitutional reading of black legal rights. *The Negro has no
rights a white man is bound to respect*, Taney famously concluded,
and thus Dred and Harriet Scott, two slaves suing for their freedom,
were ruled ineligible to bring that suit before the Court. Moreover,
the problem was not confined to enslaved blacks. Not only did Taney
conclude that blacks were not citizens, he held that they would not be
citizens even if freed. And no individual state could by extending
legal rights to blacks make them citizens of the Union proper. These
holdings helped shut down several promising argument strategies
available to Crummell.




Crummell's early thought in the 1840s began to respond to these
gathering philosophical pressures on the notion of black civil rights.
He reasoned that if arguments in favor of rights were partial to
blacks or otherwise based on the local conditions of black Americans,
then those civil rights would be subject to future retraction on
similarly partial or consequentialist grounds. And in any case, public
sympathy can be volatile and unreliable, setting up backlashes. Such
shaky ground for legal rights for blacks would be disastrous. In
particular, though black service to the country created
"favorable considerations" for the wider acceptance of
their demands for justice, it remained an insufficient and
"untenable" justification (Crummell, "New York
Convention Address," 202). "We object to others placing
our rights upon complexion," he explained, so "[w]e
ourselves [should] not lay our claims to consideration on this or any
similar ground." Only a general, rational solution can provide a
"just and impartial guarantee" of such civil rights as
those protecting voting (201). Notice that Crummell is not making the
merely political point that rights ought not be based on the
partiality that the public (and its duly elected representatives in
legislatures) might extend to blacks. He's making the stronger logical
case that it's the nature of rights to be non-partial.




This is the driving force of his positive solution to the Problem of
Civil Rights--call it the *Natural Rights
Argument*--which begins by asserting that rights exist, and
not merely in the conventional or partial sense of public
sympathy. They have a "higher origin" and a "purer
birth," as much in the sense of logical priority as in the sense
of metaphysical independence. That is, Crummell takes the Problem of
Civil Rights to require for its solution an appeal to rights as
existing prior to and independent of the legal environment in which
such rights are contested and adjudicated.




To take the *Amistad* as an example, we might give a
conventional, partial view of rights as taking them to be supported by
the sympathies of reasonable and empathetic onlookers. On that
reading, Cinque and the other Africans who rose up and killed many of
their captors had a right of self-defense, as well as a right to have
their case heard in court, given the appalling circumstance of their
kidnapping. Surely, any American would protest in just the same way if
captured, and no one would think it too extreme to use whatever force
was required to resist kidnapping. But a reading based on a natural
view of rights, the sort Crummell is urging, would make much of the
fact that the right to self-defense, especially by non-Americans in
American waters, is one that attaches to persons, and not merely
citizens, and so is a right that *pre-exists* rights granted by
law. Indeed, it is the obligation of law to properly capture any such
pre-existing rights from what a number of philosophers regard as our
"natural state." The decision might have turned out the
same, but the reasoning would be different.




The second step in Crummell's Natural Rights Argument holds that
rights may be inferred from the "settled and primary
sentiments" of human nature as well as from the "original
grounds of high dignities" and "exalted tendencies"
of our common humanity ("New York
Convention Address," 201). This is an important part of his reasoning, in
that rights are not merely abstract principles applied to human
affairs, but are derivable from our passionate and emotional
natures. In the previous century Hume made much of the textured moral
personality in his discussion of the nature of action in
society. Though he would certainly not endorse Crummell's advocacy of
natural rights in this discussion, he would surely admire his appeal
to the sentiments of human nature as a ground for legal and political
action. Hume was a great champion of emotion and
passion--"sentiments," in that era's idiom--as part of the
rationalizing of what we do. It is not that we can subordinate our
actions to reason; it is that our reason can grasp what we do from our
emotional nature and come to understand and make sense of it. Crummell
sees this as an important part of his account.




In that way the *Amistad* supports a fuller interpretation
than might otherwise be available. Recall that on the conventional,
partial reading, the justification for African self-defense is from
public sympathy for their actions. Crummell's natural rights reading
not only corrects that idea so that the law ought to bend to
pre-existing self-defense rights, but that those rights are inferable
from our sentimental nature provides a corollary explanation of
precisely why public sympathy arises at all. There is little that
nineteenth-century Americans would understand about newly arrived
Africans on a slave ship; they do not share language, religion, or much
of anything else. But the deeply human response to an absurd,
dangerous--and so clearly *wrong*--circumstance arouses in each
of us the passion that was stirred in Cinque. Our sympathy arises, not
as a condition of right, but as a consequence of it.




The third step in the Natural Rights Argument holds that any being
endowed with the "light of reason" that exercises the
various "exalted attributes" of reason possesses certain
peculiar rights on the "ground of their nature." This
explicit confidence in the powers of reason that drives the argument
is important to Crummell, and is the main reason he and Hume do not
travel far together in this discussion. But Crummell needs this sort
of rationalistic account, given that reason is our faculty for
discovering such logical connections as that between circumstantial
fact and abstract right, making it essential to the inferences that
justify that right in human affairs. It is one thing to observe that
such-and-such is the case, as one might in reviewing the facts of
the *Amistad* case. But it is quite another to articulate a
pre-existing right, abstract at least in the sense that it requires
calling up, even if (as Crummell claims) it has a basis in our
sentimental nature. Presumably one needs the ability to reflect on
general principles of action, surely a subtle rational power, as well
as the reasoning required to apply such reflection to the facts
observed. Such coordinated thinking and observing could then be
brought to cases such as the *Amistad*, where one could argue
that the general principle that holds that self-defense is permissible
applies to these very facts.




Crummell's concept of reason is thus both *natural* (in that
it's derived from our natural state, pre-existing the law) and
*categorical* (in that it is to be applied to those facts and
circumstances that come under it, independent of political
contingencies), and so ought not be jeopardized by the kind of
contingent appeals made by adherents of conventional and partial
views.




His first line of defense of the Natural Rights Argument is positive,
while his second is negative. The argument only succeeds if blacks in
fact count as an instance of its third step, the generalization about
beings who are endowed with the light of reason. His positive defense
begins by asserting that blacks "are men," an obvious
claim that is certainly necessary yet insufficient to ground the
argument. One can easily see this by noticing that a racist might
presume that some men are unequal for being less rational, due to
their race; hence more reasons are needed. Crummell thus offers what
may be called a *Common Sympathies Premise*, asserting that
black political sympathies "have the same being and
nature" as those in any other group ("New York
Convention Address," 202). His thinking is that
blacks have the same kinds of beliefs about political circumstances
and desires about political interests and outcomes as any group
would. The inference is clear, and blacks are not only men (and
women), but are men (and women) endowed with reason. Hence, blacks do
indeed count as an instance of step one.




The argument is negatively supported by black disfranchisement, that
political circumstance in which blacks were denied the right to vote.
Disfranchisement shows that both the *rights-are-inferable* and
the *rights-are-real-and-impartial* premises to be violated in
the case of black Americans. The *First Disfranchisement
Premise* states that the disfranchised condition of blacks creates
the "yearnings and longings for the exercise of political
prerogatives, that are the product of the adaptedness of man's social
nature to political arrangements, striv[ing] with irrepressible
potency within us" ("New York
Convention Address," 202). Black reactions to political power
"not proceeding from, yet operating upon" them play out as
they would for any population in a subordinated state, implying their
common humanity. The idea behind this claim is that the negative
reaction blacks have to the curtailment of their legal rights is
similar to how any group in that circumstance would feel and react;
hence we have another (admittedly negative) reason to take them as
rational beings.




The *Second Disfranchisement Premise* argues from
disfranchisement to the "indignities and wrongs" resulting
therefrom; the "accumulated potency" of these wrongs
generates "an increase and intenseness of proscription,"
illustrating how human nature's "legitimate exercises" are
"hindered" ("New York Convention Address," 203). In making this point Crummell shows,
again, that blacks are reacting to their difficult legal and political
circumstance. But this time theirs is a kind of moral discomfort, an
intense sense that a wrong is being perpetrated against them. If he is
right, he has once again supported the Natural Rights Argument's third
premise by showing that blacks are reasonable and hence full members
of civil society.




On a first read the Disfranchisement Premises appear to presuppose
the conclusion they aim to show. They appeal to the effects of wrongs
to make the case that blacks are fully human, and hence ought to have
their civil rights protected. But whether the treatment of blacks
counts *as a wrong* is the very question at issue. Of course, in
contemporary legal contexts the issue doesn't even get started, since
the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments (ratified after the Civil War)
prohibit the denial of civil rights to blacks. During the slavery era,
though, that point faced a stiff legal headwind, especially in
slavery-related cases argued before the Supreme Court, and so positive
arguments needed to be produced.




One less-than-satisfying way to avoid this fallacy is to read the two
Premises conditionally: *if blacks enjoy full moral status, then
disfranchisement counts as a wrong, particularly given the
psychological evidence of the First Disfranchisement
Premise*. This kind of reading simply takes the wrongness of
disfranchisement as a consequence of the *condition* that
blacks are rational beings in the sense required for membership in
society. That gives the argument a bit more nuance, since technically
Crummell is not asserting that blacks have that status; he would
simply be supposing, as if for the sake of argument, that they do, but
then showing that, if they do, then the psychological state of blacks
counts as a harm. The problem with this reading is that it offers no
more than what any conditional logical proof can offer--support
for the conditional in question--when what one really seeks is
support for the antecedent as well. It may be that the connection
between condition and consequence is made, but what we really want is
some reason to think that the condition has indeed been satisfied in
the case of blacks. It is easy to construct, for instance, a
paternalistic counter-argument on which black discomfort with their
disfranchisement results from exposure to abolitionist opinions. On
that reasoning, the obvious solution is to limit the exposure rather
than grant blacks the right to vote--an obviously dissatisfying
conclusion, to say the least.




A better gloss is to take the Second Disfranchisement Premise as an
*analysis* of the First: *it is not merely that blacks are
psychologically harmed by their disfranchised status, but that they
understand their psychological response to political marginality as a
moral wrong.* Hence they respond not merely to the fact of their
political weakness, but also to the denial it represents of their moral
character and efficacy *qua* moral. This route is more robust,
since it recognizes in blacks a complex moral interpretation of the
harm they are suffering, which *presupposes* the condition the
earlier rendering could only stipulate. That presupposition is
virtuous, though, since the psychological facts in question are
verifiable, and if they hold, they directly establish the moral status
in question. Moreover, paternalism is forestalled, since a moral
judgment by blacks of their own condition counts as *prima
facie* evidence that they are moral agents capable of such
judgments.




Crummell's conclusion follows directly, and black Americans are
justified in claiming "equal and entire rights" with other
citizens "on the ground of our *common humanity*"
("New York Convention Address," 203).




The Natural Rights Argument is bold and brisk in the way a young
thinker's first serious foray into moral argument is apt to be. While
somewhat programmatic, it nevertheless provides the logical framework
he needs to address moral questions about blacks. Surely they are owed
a remedy for civil-rights violations if they are the proper bearers of
such rights, for instance. And they would presumably forfeit any such
remedy if they expatriated to Africa, Canada, or Europe, places many
activists were urging them to resettle to. Hence the value of his
reasoning for practical responses to problems in black life. However,
the argument runs up several philosophical debts. First, is the moral
reasoning by which rights are justified some special precinct of a more
general kind of reasoning? What does this show about the metaphysical
basis of normative concepts? Second, the Crummellian moral philosopher
owes the reader an account of human nature, since rights are inferred
from it. Moreover, both the Common Sympathies Premise and the
Disfranchisement Premises turn on some broader psychology of agency.
What does that look like? And third, how can the timeless character of
moral concepts like rights be reconciled with the evolving character of
the human condition--the progress from slavery to freedom, for
instance? Much of Crummell's more mature moral philosophy attempts to
pay these debts; they are discussed in turn below.


## 3. The Problem of Moral Reason




The central issue running through all of these concerns of Crummell's
derives from the nature of moral reason itself. He describes the
structure of the human psyche as consisting of instinct, passion, and
reason, with reason taking priority over the other two. Reason is a
"universal and native sentiment," a "deep-felt
knowledge," and "reflexive recognition of truth,"
all of which are "spontaneous" abilities, contrasted with
the externally conditioned instinct and passion ("Eulogy for
Thomas Sidney" (July 1840) [*AC*], 3). Spontaneous reason is opposed to reason that
comes from efforts to exert "intellectual and moral
powers." Hence the need for educational and religious training,
he thought, the aim of which was to allow the individual agent
"to perceive intuitively 'those awful truths, those
eternal principles.' " His view of moral reason takes
as morally exemplary the well-honed natural intuition of timeless
moral principles.




Plato is an easy antecedent to identify in his thinking, as Crummell
biographers Gregory Rigsby and Wilson Jeremiah Moses both attest. But
Crummell's emphasis on spontaneous, unconflicted reason also evokes
Aristotelian themes. That makes it a challenge to situate him in the
history of philosophy.




Plato held a view about moral thinking that depended on seeing the
objects of moral thought as abstract, pre-existing entities. One can
already see in Crummell's Natural Rights Argument (discussed above) a
strong Platonic streak. It clearly continues here in his idea that
moral agents intuit timeless principles. Plato pursued this idea far
enough to conclude that such principles, as unchanging, were precisely
the sorts of entities that could underwrite moral conversation and
reflection. In fact, without them moral action and thinking would be
unstable and constantly shifting--as he would put it, *becoming*
what it might finally *be*, but not actually *being* that
thing. Fortunately on the Platonic approach, timeless abstract moral
principles always *are*, and so never need to be further
stabilized or justified.




But Crummell's approach evokes Aristotle as well. The Aristotelian
elements are especially distinctive, given that Aristotle's thinking
about morality was so strongly driven by his attempts to repair (what
he regarded as) flaws in Plato's thinking. Aristotle thought that
morality could not be theorized about since it is, by its nature, practical. That is, we work out what we need to *do* in our
moral lives, and even though we *think* about what that
involves, our goal is not merely to gain understanding of some abstract
moral principle, but to do some action.




Aristotle thus took the habits of moral character very
seriously--much more so than the theoretical deliberations of the
Platonist--an emphasis Crummell seems to share in his admiration of his
friend Sidney. He admires him for his naturalness at moral life,
requiring no effort to intuit the morally relevant features of a
situation. After all, if effort is required, then one does not yet have
the habits of virtue, thus coming up short on the Aristotelian metric.
If Sidney is thus admirable for lacking any weakness of will, it is
easy to suppose that effort-driven reason is a mark of such weakness,
and hence something to be avoided (or at best tolerated) until moral
excellence is achieved. Crummell's view thus seems less a Platonic
ideal of moral excellence than an Aristotelian tolerance of moral
failure. This is apt given the compromised agency that any observer
would discern in the moral condition of enslaved blacks. What Crummell
admired in Sidney is his working out of the two, a kind of excellence
in the face of compromised agency.




Crummell's notion depends on the existence of a set of fundamental
principles. Deeply unsettled moral situations, in which competing
considerations press on the choices actual individuals make, demand
that the principled individual discern the moral signal in all the
noise. His central idea is that reason cuts through to the principles
themselves, even if moral and mental effort is required to get clarity
about those principles. He takes providence to make that clarity and
progress possible. Hence his view is less dependent on the unsettled
nature of situations in producing the moral dialectic, and instead
derives from the tracking of a fundamental principle.




Crummell is acutely aware that the linguistic resources of a moral
agent help determine how fully they can reason morally and thus be
capable of the agency that draws on the principles he
describes. Though he is grossly unfair to the West African language
Grebo, his argument that it is logically inadequate to serve the
rational needs of blacks in Liberia who speak it offers an instructive
account of the interplay between language and thought. There is little
he likes about Grebo: it is "harsh, abrupt, energetic, and
indistinct in enunciation," he says, "meagre in point of
words" and "abound[ing] with inarticulate nasal and
guttural sounds" ("The English Language in Liberia"
[*FA*], 19). It "possess[es] few inflections and
grammatical forms" and hence is "exceedingly difficult of
acquisition." He feels he cannot urge Liberians to continue to
speak Grebo instead of English, given his conclusions that it is
plagued by "lowness of ideas, with brutal and vindictive
sentiments" and with "principles" that show a
predominance of "animal propensities." This is a disaster,
he writes, since (on this description) it can support few moral
concepts or distinctions, let alone concepts germane to justice and
politics, or even "truths of a personal, present deity"
and "God's moral government." His theoretical worries
concern what the "principles" of a natural-language
variety are that account for its various logical capacities, such as
expressibility and generativity.




Crummell does not think he is being prejudicial here, despite the
extreme linguistic bias any modern-day reader would take him to be
displaying. He relies on John L. Wilson's description of
Grebo--something of a standard ethnography of his day--and so to a
great extent is engaging in a positivistic rather than impressionistic
account of Grebo. Of course, any present-day language study would rely
on descriptions systematically developed from the judgments of native
speakers rather than non-native observations. And his positivism has
its theoretical basis in arguments familiar from John Locke's
philosophy of language. Words are the names of thoughts, and so
articulations in language are in effect mnemonic devices for thinking.
His regard for reason would certainly lead him to emphasize *a
priori* concepts, but the theoretical assumptions are largely due
to Locke.




Locke's philosophy of language--which he shared in its broad
outlines with predecessors Hobbes and Descartes--holds that thoughts in
the mind, whether they are innate (he thought they mostly were not) or
caused by the sensations we have, are the primary support for the words
in our language. When we utter a word, we do so because that word
*means* the idea we have in mind when we utter it. The Grebo
analysis that Crummell offers takes Lockean philosophy seriously, in
that if Grebo has "defects," it is because it is not able
to preserve the word-idea relationship in moral contexts. Though this
prejudice about Grebo is unfounded, the theory driving the prejudice
enjoyed wide acceptance.




It is tempting to see Crummell's philosophy of language in terms of
Humboldt's work in the decades prior on comparative grammars rather
than Locke's empiricist semantics. Humboldt compared linguistic
varieties in order to discover patterns across those variations, the
idea being that linguistic universals occur throughout human
experience, if only we can capture the common patterns. Crummell can
thus be read as Humboldtian, albeit an illiberal and intolerant one.
That may turn out to be a productive reading, but little historical
evidence has yet been uncovered to show that Crummell knew of
Humboldt.




In any case, his theoretical commitments led him to be suspicious of
Grebo's ability to support moral discourse, since he thinks it is
unreliable. The situation is especially urgent for the kinds of
pre-existing principles that form the (abstract, unchanging) objects
of moral conversation. For those are *a priori* by
nature--they exist independently of the experiences about which
we might converse. As such, there is that much greater a burden on
moral language for a Lockean like Crummell, since a speaker could not
rely on their sensations to support the language they are using. They
need to have strong powers of memory as part of their faculty of
reason, recalling the timeless *a priori* principles to be
applied to these current facts. (Plato makes a similar point
in *The Republic*, observing the importance of memory in moral
reasoning and philosophy, especially in the training of the guardian
class.) This helps inform his view that blacks ought to adopt English
as a remedy for the linguistic "defects" he thinks plagues
Grebo. The ability of English to preserve the complex logical
structure of abstract moral reasoning (given its syntactic and
semantic structure) recommends it, as well as its infinite
productivity.




A broader question arises here. By concentrating on purported
deficits of rationality of Africans in particular, and blacks in
general, as opposed to examining its causes (say, slavery and race
discrimination), isn't the analysis misplaced? After all, if the causes
of diminished cognitive resources are political and historical, then
any proposed remedy would presumably have to offset (if not remove)
those causes. One could go even further (as Crummell easily could) and
argue that if cognitive resources are diminished due to
*morally* pernicious causes, then *moral* progress will
be stymied unless and until a just accounting of those causes has been
made, and remedies are carried out.




One could read Crummell's various arguments about posterity and
moral change (below), as well as his case for black civil rights
(above), as a vindication of this idea. He may be interpreted as making
a moral case for black progress and civilization *precisely as*
a moral offset to the moral harm that has plagued blacks. But the
sticking point in that interpretation would be his understanding of
language and cognition. If his goal is to provide a moral counterweight
to discrimination and its effects, it seems he hasn't pursued it
through all of its effects--specifically those that concern cognition
and linguistic ability. He is quite unsparing in his analysis of civil
rights; why wouldn't he also articulate his case in terms of language
and reasoning, if that was his real purpose? And the complaint implicit
in the question stands as a criticism.




It may be that Crummell thought moral criticism of this sort was
appropriate, but doubted that cognitive deficit could be due to such an
oppressive history. Rarely did he ascribe any black shortcoming to
lingering effects of slavery, other than in the very broadest of terms.
It is likely, given how much is presently understood about
environmental factors in linguistic development, and how little was
known then, that it didn't seem plausible to him to think there was any
causal connection between slavery and cognitive resources.




Whatever the right interpretation, his view of the nature of
civilization will figure into his thinking. Crummell saw each
generation as having an obligation to posterity, namely, to contribute
to civilization, much the way a farmer has to work the soil to produce
a harvest; failure to do so leads to the death of the land, so to
speak, and the same is true for civilization. To contribute, though,
requires resources (cognitive and linguistic ones included), cultivated
in a public discourse that makes value and meaning, held among common
people, from which intellectuals emerge and draw. (This anticipates Du
Bois' "talented tenth" idea.) Crummell thought blacks, devastated by
slavery, were severely incapacitated and hence couldn't produce in the
general population the seeds for that intellectual emergence and
civilization. One response could be to assign blame for this woeful
state of affairs, as just discussed. Crummell would certainly not
disagree that hindrances to blacks led to this cultural derailment and
subsequent defect (as he saw it). But his concern was with the
resources themselves: how could blacks regroup and make up lost ground?
Hence his preoccupation with the cognitive resources rather than with
accusation and protest. (The activist Douglass provides a ready
contrast.)




While language-deficiency theories have since been discredited,
Crummell's language analysis remains valuable for its attempt to
describe the work that the deep features of the grammar of the
colloquial English commanded by American blacks play in reasoning and
discourse.


## 4. The Problem of Motivation




The principles of moral reasoning and discourse require effective
causation in order to realize agency. In a series of closely related
arguments--the Mental Principle Argument, the Moral Principle
Argument, and the Memory versus Recall Argument--Crummell begins
to describe this relationship. According to his *Mental Principle
Argument*, the god worshipped by a people elevates or debases them
since "the abstract principle that the idea of God contains,
inherently, such transforming power in a nation, that it makes or
unmakes, according as it is clear, and right, and grand; or, on the
other hand, is low, and rude, and sensual" ("God and the
Nation" [*FA*], 154). "National greatness"
correlates with these ideas, a point he thinks is obvious. While
thought may be the spur to enterprise and organized society, the
"generative principle" of the "active power and
activity" of mind is the idea of God (155). It is not that God
simply determines which actions and events occur, but that the idea of
God causes human thought to generate the varied activities of civil
society, and so "magnifies a nation's mind" leading to
"development in every mode and direction" (158). Being
oriented to the future in turn leads individuals to make an enduring
nation that can survive them. Crummell is convinced that blacks are
well suited to legacy-building because of their "plastic"
nature possessing that "native mobility and adaptedness"
required to withstand "elements diverse from and stronger than
their own"; blacks are patient enough "to wait for the
future, in calm abidance and with confident assurance"
("Hope for Africa" [*FA*], 321). He rejects the
counter-argument that individuals are mortal, and since nations are
simply aggregates of individuals they are likewise mortal. Over and
above such aggregates nations are societies "in an organized
state, under the influence and control of broad principles and
superior ideas" ("God and the Nation,"
161). Reason's activity is civilizing, leading directly to a further
progressive development of that reason.




According to Crummell's *Moral Principle Argument*, just as the
migration of populations is a fact of human life, occurring throughout
human history, so too is the moral history of meaning and action that
is built up around it. He takes this to be providential, not
accidental. We may "discover evidences of a large and
comprehensive plan, which excludes all ideas of the accidental or
adventitious" ("Emigration, an Aid to the Civilization of
Africa" [*AA*], 412). Human events in general accord with
God's "grand moral economy" in which God is an
"ever-active agent" (413). Crummell acknowledges that
"our finite vision" often "fail[s] the
discovery" of genuine moral ends. Consistent with his
deontological understanding of moral obligation, as well as his
realism about the moral, the effort to discover and examine moral ends
by the reasoning agent is essentially an application of our mental
faculties to scrutable moral problems, a mental task assigned by
God. As the active, directing force and principle, the will of God
"overrules all the deeds, the counsels, and the designs of men,
and tracks them from their unseen germs, ...to those manifest and
notable deeds which rank among historic facts" (413).




Hence a link between the Moral Principle Argument and the Mental
Principle Argument: an active principle of thought causes action, is
the subject of history, and has God as its source. If those deeds are
good, then they are *God-caused* (regardless of any purported
causal contribution by the agent). God supplies the suggestion,
adjustment, direction, and order of the deeds "so that while men act on
their own personal responsibility, they nevertheless act either
consciously or unconsciously as the agents of God" (414). Thus we
cannot override God's will. And if those deeds are evil, then they are
*God-exploited*, since God distracts that which is evil and
directs us to providentially approved ends. To the counter-argument
that God is not concerned with secular history, Crummell argues that
that would imply that there exists some non-God that governs the
secular, thus dividing "the moral government of God," an absurdity. In
any case, God's hand is evident throughout history. A moral vanguard is
to respond in an active way to Mental and Moral Principles and affect
the course of history, thereby increasing the civilization potential of
those principles for future generations. "The hand of God is on the
black man, in all the lands of his distant sojourn, for the good of
Africa" ("Emigration," 421); God thus intervenes in history and uses blacks as his
agents, creating an additional impetus for blacks to affect history's
course. Crummell is a moral vanguardist in this way, since an advance
"remnant" of the people does the work of God.




His *Memory versus Recall Argument* reveals the limitations of
such vanguards. He recounts in his 1891 book *Africa and
America* a sharp public exchange he has with Douglass over the
effect of actively recalling how slavery degraded black
life. Douglass, ever the activist, thought such recall was
inspirational, motivating moral progress, while the relentlessly
analytical Crummell thought it dispiriting and morally regressive. He
decried what he saw as the "irresistible tendency in the Negro
mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile
past" to the detriment of the needs of the future. Active recall
of slavery, he argued, jeopardized black moral progress ("The
Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era" [*AA*],
18-19). Of course it "is not the memory of slavery"
to be guarded against "but the constant recollection of it, as
the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching on to
the broadest freedom of thought in a new and glorious present, and a
still more magnificent future." Memory is passive, as "the
necessary and unavoidable entrance, storage and recurrence of facts
and ideas to the understanding and the consciousness." But
recollection is a mental action, "the actual seeking of the
facts, ...the painstaking endeavor of the mind to bring them back
again to consciousness." By the "law of
association," then, it tends to "degradation."




Language plays a central role in this process, echoing the point he
makes about the English language in Africa. "Words are vital
things," explained Crummell, since they are "always
generative of life or death" and cannot "enter the soul as
passive and inoperative things" (19). Moreover, to be limited
in word and thought is to undermine moral reasoning, which is the
condition of the "savage." On the other hand, the
"changed circumstances" of blacks generate "an
immense budget of new thoughts, new ideas, new projects, new purposes,
new ambitions, of which our fathers never thought"
(19-20).


## 5. The Problem of Moral Change


### 5.1 The Argument from Posterity




Like other enlightenment thinkers, Crummell takes posterity very
seriously, urging his contemporaries to moral action that will create a
legacy that later generations will both enjoy and emulate. His
reasoning is relatively straightforward, pivoting on the idea that the
main conceptual artifact of a people is their national culture.



*National culture* captures a complex idea for Crummell. On the
one hand, he argues that each generation has a duty to the
future--specifically, a duty to make the future better than the
past--an obligation he often described in terms of
"civilization." Civilization thus accumulates all of the
greatest symbolic achievements of the past: literature, philosophy,
the arts, and so on. But that does not happen
without *cultivating* the population whose symbolic
achievements are thus collected. What we would today call
*culture*, with little or none of his idea of progress and
improvement, Crummell and his contemporaries thought of as *that
which is so cultivated, and hence is prepared to add to
civilization*. But while civilization is for everyone--it is
universal, Crummell would say--culture is particular to this or that
group, this or that *nation*. National culture is thus that set
of symbolic achievements made by a particular (national) group for the
good of universal (world) civilization. The Negro, in the idiom of
Crummell's day, has no less obligation than any other "nation" to make
a cultural contribution to civilization. 




He understands moral change, in part, as a condition for such a
culture to be possible, so it is not surprising that he recognizes a
collective duty to satisfy that condition. His is a particularly
aggressive account, in that the duties to posterity are categorical and
universal, setting the price blacks have to pay to affect the course of
history.




History, to Crummell's mind, is the series of events that concerns the
progress of civilization. As various groups produce their symbolic
institutions, and as those national cultures improve humanity's state
of civilization, forward progress is being achieved, and the
back-and-forth of ordinary life is getting closer to achieving the
fundamental pre-existing nature of things as they really are. Crummell
clearly subscribes (as did Plato) to a strong version of this view of
history. On Plato's version, the ordinary events we now simply call
"history"--wars, recessions, presidential elections,
etc.--are part of the changing world of approximations and
inexactness. As such, they are in flux, becoming one thing after
another, but never actually being anything permanent. But the
pre-existing principles that underwrite moral reasoning are timeless
and unchanging--and hence permanent. History cannot be about
what is transient, despite the passage of time it implies; rather, it
is about what *endures* through the passage of time.




This is actually not as foreign to contemporary notions as it may
seem. True, we keep a historical record, which is meant to keep track
of the affairs of human societies, without prejudice or interpretation.
But the record we keep is updated as we begin to grasp the impact the
recorded events have on the future and what we take to be our
collective destiny. Consider the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. The
initial event was confusing because, though devastating, it was not
clear whether its impact was on foreign policy and affairs of state
(that is, whether it was an act of war) or on domestic policy and
criminal justice (that is, whether it was a criminal act), a question
that still seems unsettled. Of course, there is no controversy about
the *fact* that some event occurred. It is that we do not (yet)
have a settled *description* of those facts; hence the history
of that event is not yet written. Indeed, history in our day is very
much an assessment of the record in light of our future, an uncertain
and ongoing conversation by a nation about itself.




Crummell is more modern than Plato, in the sense that he orients the
question of history from the perspective of the nation and its culture
that is trying to understand its place with respect to civilization.
For Plato, the orientation is that of the universal truths--we might
say it is cosmic--and so our response to them is more derivative and
secondary. Plato might say that the Negro is trying to engage the
timeless truths of civilization in order to realize what the true
nature of reality is like. Crummell would emphasize instead that it is
the Negro who helps make that reality present itself to us as it
does--its timeless nature is timeless, to be sure, but it is a central
character in the drama of history *in our moment* and *as we
see it*. It is in our time that it will act, just as it is in our
time that we will bring about the progress to be achieved.




The *Argument from Posterity* begins with Crummell's
observation that individuals have some "relation" to the
"entire race"; "a nation is a collection of
men...of the same make, and nature, and appetencies, and destiny,
as ourselves" comprising but a "section of the great
commonwealth of humanity, a phase of the common type of being, and no
more" ("The Duty of a Rising Christian State"
[*FA*], 59-60). The moral moment in our common destiny is
to "go forward and upward" (63). The movement of national
culture through time is thus *singular* (neither multiple nor
diverse, even if diversely contributed to), *progressive*
(movement leads to improvement), and ultimately *unifying*. It
is as if "all the preceding generations of mankind, and all the
various nations, have lived for every successive generation,"
suggesting that there is "no absolute disseverance of individual
nations" (63-64).




Kant's insistence that human history is the working out of
"nature's plan" to realize the full natural capacities of
humans in society anticipates Crummell's social progressivism
("Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
Purpose," proposition 8). For Kant the ultimate goal was the
perfect form of civil society; so too for Crummell, though his vision
reserves a central driving role to the character of agents, moreso
than to the justice of actions. This shouldn't be overstated of
course. Kant clearly regarded enlightenment as a triumph of
"culture" over "barbarism" as he took it to be
the generalizing of principles of justice. But Crummell's
understanding of the duty to posterity seems much more entangled with
the *fidelity* of the Negro to Moral Principles than the
*justice* of those Principles.




If Crummell is more modern than Plato, Kant's view of historical
progress is more modern than Crummell's. Though both Kant and Crummell
see and evaluate the sweep of historical events from the standpoint of
a particular group or individual, Kant thought that the kind of
significant history Crummell worried about blacks contributing to was
not even possible without robust self-awareness. It is only when
someone can reason about their actions by observing them
logically--that is, as a rational law-giver might--that
self-awareness has been minimally achieved. So for Kant the ultimate
obligation of a modern society is to preserve such moral autonomy;
indeed, it is an important condition for enlightenment.




Crummell's philosophy is less modern than Kant's given Crummell's
insistence on the importance of one's racial nature in helping create
the conditions for morality and history (cf. Kirkland
1992-1993). The duty Crummell has in mind is to the Mental and
Moral Principles that comprise progressive reason. It has little to do
with whatever group one belongs to, though one's contribution is at
least partly determined by the national character of their people or
race. In any case the progress of reason is the moral determiner;
"our life, our culture, and our civilization are but the result
of the ceaseless energy of mind and body of all past nations"
("Rising Christian State," 64). This all furthers the effort to "cultivate men,"
nurturing "that largeness of soul--that quick, glad
recognition of noble principles--that love of and reverence for
fixed and eternal truth--that eager desire for the work of
life" (74). This is a prerequisite for a national culture, since
nations need "citizens with large, expanded minds, a fine
culture, with natural or acquired manners, and a constant delicate
honor" (74). There is a collective duty to enhance the
civilizing potential of civilizing rational principles because of its
potential to further civilize in the future, something that is
intrinsically valuable. The associated duty to the land of one's
fathers is implied by a duty of self-respect, given the common
"negro blood flowing in his veins" ("The Relations
and Duty of Free Colored Men" [*FA*], 219). This duty is
all the more urgent because of Africa's "benightedness,"
and it is all the more binding because of the Kantian focus on
nature's plan, understood in social context. Crummell appeals here to
the self-regard of black Americans--"in its normal state
and in its due degree... 'is as just and morally good as
any affection whatever' " (221, Crummell quoting
Butler)--to motivate their sense of duty to black Africans.




It is hard to read Crummell and not recall the problem of evil that
haunts providential philosophies of history. If history unfolds as God
sees fit, then why do such devastating historical wrongs as American
slavery occur? It seems that either God is *unable* to prevent
such wrongs (but isn't God all-powerful?), God is *unaware* that
they are occurring (but isn't God all-knowing?), or that God is
*unwilling* to stop such wrongs (but isn't God all-good?). None
of those options is available to the providential philosopher of
history, since if God lacked any one of those traits then he cannot be
the God that drives history. Instead, he would be as we are, characters
trying to impact the course of history.




Crummell has a few responses to this problem. One is the classic
reply of theists, that God allows evil passively, and does so with
character-building and moral instruction in mind. And of course
Crummell is acutely aware that humans are capable of great moral evil.
It is not so much that God is unable to stop evil as that humanity is
so able at propagating it.




But there's another kind of response that can be teased out of
Crummell. His is a Platonic metaphysics, so for him reality is that
unchanging pre-existing world of fundamental principles and concepts.
That which is good is so due to the unchanging (and unrealized in the
everyday world) nature of that which is good in itself. A sophisticated
Platonist with a theistic overlay like Crummell sees evil only when the
good in itself has been *corrupted*, which is impossible since
the good is an abstract timeless object. Of course there is suffering
in our shadowy transient realm; that is regrettable in the strongest
terms possible. But that is due to our imperfect grasp of the timeless
nature of the good. It is the good itself which persists, accounting
for our achievement of a better future. The problem of evil is thus a
kind of misdirection; the real issue is the problem of our ignorance of
the good, which indicts us, not God.




Crummell's Kantian point helps make his larger argument clearer in
another way as well. The progressivism that both thinkers urged is
rooted in a common view about nature's endowing humans with various
capacities. While for Kant that positions the argument for the
progress of reason, Crummell sees it widening the ensemble of factors
toward progress. For instance, commerce is praised for the civilizing
role it plays, and yet, as he observes, the slave trade (clearly
a destructive force) was the main commercial activity in Africa. Given
the natural resources of West Africa, that could easily be
changed. The "acquisitive principle" combined with
productive labor can lead to civilization, "uplift[ing] and
enlighten[ing] the heathen!" ("Duty of Free Colored Men," 229-30). This is an
opportunity that should not be squandered. "If the black
man...civilized and enlightened" enjoys "a golden
heritage, and fails to seize upon and to appropriate it, Providence
none the less intends it to be seized upon and wills it to be
used," implying that whites who capitalize on the opportunity to
create wealth would be justified (231). The heart of the argument is
commerce's ability to create conditions for order and comfort from
disorder and wildness. Moral consequences follow, including the
desire for industry, the need for planning, and the creation of future
chances for increased wealth. Self-reliance thus occupies a central
place as a primary virtue of the civilized; the principle of
acquisition and the efforts it generates at self-support and
self-reliance lead to profitable commerce and investment, ultimately
generating moral improvement, all in keeping with
providence. "[B]lack men in Africa must do what enterprising men
do in all other new lands: they must BEND NATURE TO THEIR WANTS AND
WISHES" (253). Of course this confidence in the moral
improvement conferred by labor and industry was widely held--by
Kant too--but in Crummell's thinking it is inextricably rooted in
Africa as well as the agrarian American South, and so the civilizing
that he thought blacks needed required an investment in lands they
found themselves in, or had an original bond to.




Liberia crystallizes these strands of argument; its founders sought to
establish a "civilized nationality" there, as Crummell
describes it ("The Responsibility of the First Fathers of a
Country" [*AA*], 132). That was their "tremendous
responsibility" and "great obligation," namely,
"to act as worthy trustees of distant generations and of future
times." They exemplified what he thinks is required to fulfill
the duty to future progress. What remains is the need to link
"sentiment" and "outward forms and symbols"
(134); such is the substance of national cultures. Civil government is
not the main site of this experiment in making a national culture, but
its structure matters since "man's opportunities for personal
freedom, for intellectual advancement, for social comfort, for
domestic bliss, and for religious growth, depend very measurably upon
his civil status" (135). The nature of this dependence runs
deep, and may even be organic: "an ennobled manhood and the
masculine virtues are generally the fruits of distinct national
systems"; "the spirit of a people and their form of
government are mostly reciprocal; ...for the higher kind of human
character, you are forced to seek an analogy of rule and system as its
parent." This underwrites a sorting of national cultures.
"All the art, the refinement, the magnificence of Paris [will]
fail to realize that ideal of human government which is the aspiration
of every free soul," he writes, "and which is an essential
element in the growth of free and manly character" (136). But we
are political agents, and this culture is something we need to take an
active role in making. We are creators in the sense that we can act in
an unconstrained way. But the range of choices of government is
limited to free or repressive; one or the other must come to be. He
argues that that is a matter of necessity since, "*according
to the constitution of things,* no other political systems than
these *can* exist" (137). It is our choosing that
determines which comes to be. He obviously endorses a free civil
government, and his posing of a choice to his audience in keeping with
his set-up of the question is meant to make the point that free
government is preferable because it leads to human flourishing. It is
less a political philosophy than a social and moral philosophy; the
institutions that make our collective social efforts effective ought
to be free in order to enable us to become civilized, noble, and
enlightened, leading to "a system which will enlarge the souls
of men" and "give them manhood and superiority"
(139). A free system thus "distinguishes calm Republicanism from
wild and lawless Democracy." The institutional framework of
action thus creates the space for the individual moral life, that
"good" life one tries to make for oneself. Such a system
"starts men in the race for improvement...seeks their moral
elevation, and aims to strengthen their souls" (140).




It is clear that Crummell thinks races ought to make nations as
their instrument of civilizing uplift, but it is nowhere evident that
he thinks races are the objects of that uplift. Instead, civilization
is a good in itself, and ought to frame the political goals of a free
nation. The principle that makes this go is "*that organic principle
of being which binds the present to the future, under a sense of duty
and responsibility*" ("First Fathers," 141). He isn't shy at any point in his
analysis. The problem of moral flourishing is one that has a
political-institution component, but it is just as obvious to him that
it has a metaphysical component, namely the linkage through time of
human actions and how they bear on future effects. "According to the
organization of our being," he observes, "we are unable to confine
ourselves to the mere brief period of life allotted us in this world.
No man can thus make his life a disconnected, isolated unit" (141).
This part of the argument proceeds in several stages. First, since
human action is diachronic, so too is human agency. And second, since
human kinds (races) have a cultural and moral component, agency is not
without contextualizing factors, as "one generation is, of necessity,
the framer and shaper of both the character and the destiny of another"
(145-46). This obligates present agents since "the character of a
people is a continuous and integral quality" shared by ancestor and
descendant alike. Hence Crummell lays the groundwork for his moral
progressivism, especially as it applies to blacks. The remaining
difficulty is to explain how moral change is possible.


### 5.2 The Moral Change Argument




Crummell's *Moral Change Argument* begins with a tension. He
claims that moral enlightenment cannot be caused by non-enlightenment.
No "rude, heathen people" have ever "raised
themselves by their own spontaneous energy" to a "morally
elevated" state, he argues ("The Regeneration of
Africa" [*AA*], 435); the efforts of those
"superior" in "letters or grace" are generally
required. This implies that moral enlightenment cannot be
indigenous. Against this restriction on the cause of enlightenment is
his concern that, to be effective, the enlightening influence has to
become indigenous. *The heathen cannot enlighten themselves*,
yet, since no one can become enlightened by non-indigenous agents,
enlightened agents have to become indigenous--that is, *some
heathen have to be enlightened*--as a condition for the
enlightenment of the heathen. So how can any heathen be enlightened,
unless they are already enlightened?




Crummell is not pessimistic though, since religious conversion faces
similar obstacles, and often succeeds despite them. The "employment of
all indigenous agency," he announces, is that "great principle which
lies at the basis of all successful propagation of the Gospel" (437).
The solution to the dilemma is for the enlightened to be racially and
psychologically similar to the would-be enlightened. "[M]en of like
sentiments, feelings, blood and ancestry" are required for moral
enlightenment, and hence are necessary for moral change. It is
intriguing that his analysis does not demand *affinity of
thought* between the enlightened and the target for moral
improvement, a condition it seems reasonable to insist on. Sentiments
and feelings go to sympathy, whereas blood and ancestry go to racial
similarity; neither is mental. Interestingly, the collision between
restricted cause and restricted effect amplifies the importance of
moral reason's indifference to this or that race's particular nature,
even as it is put to use in precisely those situations where such
differences are definitive (racial contact most notably).




Raising the stakes for moral change is Crummell's belief that no
single individual ever accomplished anything epochal; "everywhere
we find that the great things of history have been accomplished by
the combination of men" ("The Social Principle Among a People"
[*DR*], 31). This is also the case for such moral achievements
as abolishing slavery. It took "the masses of the godly" to be
"marshaled to earnest warfare" to create moral change on a grand
scale (32). Thus, significant moral change occurs only in the context
of social efforts. This is natural given the *Social Principle*,
as Crummell calls it: that "disposition which leads men to
associate and join together for specific purposes; the principle
which makes families and societies, and which binds men in unity and
brotherhood, in races and churches and nations" (31). We are social by
nature, since our native "sympathies and affections" are the source of
our "desire for companionship." And this can't be opted out of: we were
"formed" with "a fitness and proclivity for association, ...a
nature that demanded society."




The Social Principle's transcendental role in moral change can be
problematic though. For instance, it is easy to sense in Crummell's
description Du Bois' famous dialectic between two forms of black
consciousness, decades before he stated it. Here is how Crummell puts
it:



> 
> 
> We are living in this country, a part of its population, and
> yet, in divers respects, we are as foreign to its inhabitants as though
> we were living in the Sandwich Islands. It is this our actual
> separation from the real life of the nation, which constitutes us "a
> nation within a nation": thrown very considerably upon ourselves for
> many of the largest interests of life, and for nearly all our social
> and religious advantages. ("Social Principle," 32)
> 
> 
> 




Like the Du Boisian struggle--and echoing Kant's description of
the antagonism inherent in "unsociable sociability"
("Idea for a Universal History")--it is one of a
consciousness "foreign to" the American consciousness
native to the population of "this country." This
foreign-ness creates the "actual separation" that throws
blacks "upon ourselves." It is not a contest between equal
and opposite forces, but a kind of resultant force produced by a
stronger active force and a weaker passive force. Crummell's is thus
a sort of Hegelian stand-off: a conflict between blacks and the needs
and "interests" and social advantages they seek, a contest
set up by their natural form.




Du Bois and Hegel both saw the effort to be a self-conscious free
individual as something that was enacted in historical time. Hegel, for
instance, took masters and slaves to coordinate each other's
achievement of self-consciousness, each seeing themselves in terms of
what the other is capable of doing. Du Bois identifies a similar
coordination between the "inner selves" of blacks, one African, the
other American, both native and alien at the same time. Crummell sees
blacks opposing themselves in a conflict that cannot be opted out of,
since it is a constitutive part of the struggle for self-awareness that
every people goes through. He thus moves the focus from where a casual
observer might look--the action between blacks and whites, slaves and
masters--to an internal struggle--between blacks and their own
conflicted nature.



> 
> 
> As a consequence on this state of things, all the stimulants of
> ambition and self-love should lead this people to united effort for
> personal superiority and the uplifting of the race; but, instead
> thereof, overshadowed by a more powerful race of people; wanting
> in the cohesion which comes from racial enthusiasm; lacking in the
> confidence which is the root of a people's stability; disintegration,
> doubt, and distrust almost universally prevail, and distract all their
> business and policies. ("Social Principle," 32)
> 
> 
> 




It is easy to discern the main threads of Crummell's influence on Du
Bois' later thought.




Crummell remains encouraged about African enlightenment through all
of this, though. Principles of *Mutuality* and
*Dependence* follow from the Social Principle, facilitating
moral change. The Principle of Mutuality determines those
"reciprocal tendencies and desires which interact between large bodies
of men, aiming at single and definite ends," while the Principle
of Dependence has "[n]o man stand[ing] up entirely alone,
self-sufficient in the entire circle of human needs" ("Social Principle," 33). He observes
that "it has taken ten centuries to change [the Englishman] from the
rudeness of his brutalized forefathers into an enlightened and
civilized human being" (34); so too, he thought, for African moral
change.




It thus becomes easier to discern Crummell's larger view about how a
people can impact the course of history. The active Mental and Moral
Principles of reason start a cycle, causing a people so stirred to
satisfy conditions of intellectual and moral enlightenment. Once they
are enlightened, reason itself--considered as an abstract, global
resource, the main active force in history--increases in its civilizing
potential. Thus the history of reason moves forward as a vital, active
principle, completing a feedback loop. For blacks to affect history,
they must become civilized, and propagate civilizing reason to push
history forward. (As I describe above, this process is part of each
generation's obligations to posterity within the course of history.)
Fortunately the Social Principle and its corollaries optimize the
chances of that happening.




But for the cycle to get its start, the "native" must be
trusted with the possibility of civilization--in Matthew Arnold's
phrase (quoted approvingly by Crummell), the "possibility of
right." Until they achieve that state, they are to be treated
with the necessity of tutelage, the "necessity of force and
authority." "Mere theories of democracy" cannot be
applied to "a rude people, incapable of perceiving their own
place in the moral scale, nor of understanding the social and
political obligations" of civilized peoples ("Our National
Mistakes" [*AA*], 185). "Force and right,"
Crummell writes, quoting Arnold, "are the governors of this
world; *force till right is ready*....And till right is
ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the
legitimate rule." He agrees with Arnold that right
"implies inward recognition" that we must be capable of
both "seeing" and "willing." Until that is
attained, until the "native" outgrows their
"childhood," the enlightened have the
"responsibility of guardianship over them."




This awkward paternalism is difficult for the contemporary reader to
accept. It must be read, though, in the context of the respect he has
for the native intelligence in all groups, his fellow blacks included.
Agreeing with Mill's caution that force over the native should be that
which fits them to become a nation Crummell insists that force should
be the force of restoration and progress ("Our National Mistakes," 185n). In the "native
man's moral constitution" is a "great felt need, and a
great object of desire [for] peace, order, and protection"; and
they are motivated by an acquisitive principle, "the impelling
motive power in all [their] endurance and weariness" (191). He
understood that there simply was no project without a native African
capacity for civilization.