Editors Note: In a yellowed and dog-eared manilla folder I recently found this draft of a letter on ‘Liberty and the Duty Against Evil.’ It was typed out with several cross outs and spelling errors. On the back side was a ‘to do’ list written in pencil with a list of things I needed to take care of for finals. Letters are a time machine taking you back to the time, place and emotion. Emails will never capture the same feeling. I believe I wrote several drafts and sent a final letter. I’m not sure how much of this version was used. I think I came across as supporting my counter argument and not just a shrill bleeding heart. I’m certain this only fueled Andy to challenge me more.
May 1993
Mr. A. Little,
I’m in receipt of your latest letter, so glad you are well and settling in up there in Yankee territory and beset on all sides by Catholics. God help them. They know not what danger they are in. Your latest epistle carries all the hallmarks of your style: intellect cloaked in contrarianism, Calhoun polished with Hobbes, and Thucydides drafted into the service of your peculiar sympathies. I cannot let it pass unchallenged.
You argue, with the gravity of a true Son of the South, that liberty cannot be bestowed, only seized. That a man “freed” by the will of another is not truly free, for he has ‘not tasted the struggle that sanctifies liberty’. Thus, you say, the enslaved of America could not have loved freedom had it been merely granted them, any more than the colonies could have cherished independence had the Crown magnanimously released its grip.
It is a clever analogy, but it betrays you, my friend. For you reason not as Plato’s philosopher but more as a son of a son of a sharecropper, seeking to ennoble the bitterness of history with the language of necessity. In defending Liberty you have stumbled into defending its very denial.
Let us be plain. Where there is evil, and you recognize it as such, it is your moral duty to fight it. You feel it in your gut and know it to be true. To suggest otherwise is to reduce philosophy to decoration, wisdom to cowardice. I’ll spare you the contemporary defense of ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’ and use your ancients instead. Plato warns us in the Republic that injustice is not merely a blemish on the city but a disease of the soul. Aristotle may speak of “natural slaves,” but if reason is the mark of man, then to enslave a man is to pervert his telos and it is to make a tool of a being born for thought. And Socrates, in the Apology, accepts death itself rather than betray truth, reminding us that to suffer injustice is better than to commit it.
You lean on Thucydides, yet recall what he teaches: when the Athenians told the Melians that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” Thucydides offered no applause — he offered tragedy. He showed that naked power consumes itself. In the same way, the Confederacy, built upon slavery, carried within it the seeds of its ruin.
Liberty, you say, must be seized, not given. But what of those stripped of every tool with which to seize it? The enslaved were denied arms, denied property, denied even literacy. To demand they first demonstrate their worthiness by achieving liberty alone is to make their oppression into its own justification. That is Calhoun’s logic, not philosophy’s.
And so I remind you, with the indignation of William Lloyd Garrison: ‘no man counsels moderation to the victim of a fire, or tells a mother to patiently rescue her child from the flames. To speak of gradualism, or of “earning” freedom through revolt, is sophistry. Slavery was not a neutral condition awaiting correction, but a collection of crimes… daily, systematic, unrelenting.’ To equivocate here is to stand not with Socrates but with the jury that condemned him.
My dear friend, you tempt me with your rhetoric, but I will not be seduced. As simple minded and naive as I be, this assertion of yours gnaws at. my heart. Liberty is not the prize of the strong, nor the inheritance of a region. It is the birthright of man. The moment you deny it to another, you enslave yourself to falsehood.
Yours, in pursuit of truth,
Brad
PS, When are coming home next?
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