Martin Luther King Day provides an opportunity to reflect on self-defense by individuals in persecuted minorities.
Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, published a newspaper out of Rochester, NY, named the Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In 1854, another escaped slave was caught in Boston and eventually returned to his master in Virginia under the federal Fugitive Slave Act. While he was jailed, a crowd of abolitionist intent on liberating him attacked the jail and killed a US marshal trying to repel them. (Nobody was ever condemned for that.) The Frederick Douglas’ Paper of June 9, 1854 (page 2) commented with a piece titled “The True Remedy for the Fugitive Slave Bill.” Although without a byline, it was likely written by Frederick Douglass himself. The first paragraph reads (emphasis in the original):
A good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap. Let every colored man make up his mind to this, and live by it, and if needs be, die by it. This will put an end to kidnapping and to slaveholding, too. We blush to our very soul when we are told that a Negro is so mean and cowardly that he prefers to live under the slavedriver’s whip—to the loss of life or liberty. Oh! that we had a little more of the manly indifference to death, which characterized the Heroes of the American Revolution.
The Library of Congress advises me that that “the ‘true remedy’ theme in connection with slavery is mentioned more than 30 times in various African American newspapers, from ca. 1828-1860” (email of December 28, 2022). I was alerted to Douglass’s statement by Damon Root’s interesting article “The New York Times Is Surprised To Find Public Defenders Championing the Second Amendment” (Reason, August 1, 2022).
The last two sentences of Douglass’s quote above raise what is known to economists as the problem of collective action (see Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action [Harvard University Press, 1971]). If a large number of slaves (assuming they could have owned or obtained revolvers), escaped slaves, and their supporters had shot a sufficient number of slave owners and slave catchers, they would have abolished slavery. The collective action problem is who will start the action and shoot first, for those are themselves likely be killed or punished instead of being liberated. Most people are not willing to die for a cause, even just, that is likely to only benefit others.
If however Douglass had succeeded instilling in a sufficient number of individuals the “determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap” or to shoot any slave master, slavery would have unraveled through a simple mechanism of incentives. The way to stop persecution is to increase its cost for persecutors so that they don’t derive any net benefit from it. If that succeeds, the persecutor will back off. Individual self-defense by persecuted individuals or their supporters may not be sufficient by itself to achieve that goal, but it can contribute to it.
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Jan 16 2023 at 11:02am
An excellent defense of the second ammendment! Some studies find that citizens with guns prevent a million crimes every year.
Warren Platts
Jan 16 2023 at 11:44am
Pierre isn’t talking about using guns to prevent crime, he’s talking about using guns to commit crimes, albeit by breaking unjust laws (as judged by himself, of course). This is also sometimes called terrorism when the number of active participants is below the critical mass needed for open rebellion.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 16 2023 at 12:26pm
Warren: If all moral values are relative, you are totally right. If you believe that some values are conducive, and some are not, to the maintenance a free civilization, you are not correct. Two challenging books may help you see this: Hayek’s Rules and Order, and Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.
Laurentian
Jan 16 2023 at 2:26pm
So liberalism is subjective but we need certain objective standards as defined by liberals. Oh and these objective standards constantly change and evolve (as defined by liberals of course) and will never change in a way liberals won’t like even though aren’t Hayek and Buchanan regarded as pretty outdated in Current Year despite winning Nobels? Hayek is likely to be only brought up these days to be condemned for his supposed “neoliberal free-market fundamentalism” and Pinochet while Buchanan is only being noticed for his supposed racism.
And interesting that your article about the evils of slavery links to article about a man influenced by slave-owners.
Also don’t totalitarians like to use of the simple mechanism of repression to incentivize dissenters to shut up? Since that doesn’t maintain a free society I assume it doesn’t count.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 18 2023 at 1:15pm
Laurentian: With due respect, I fear you are pretty confused (but I was like you when I was young). For Buchanan, there are only individual values and all values are subjective; and since all individuals are equal, their preferences and values can only be reconciled by unanimous consent. Try to challenge fashionable ideas in your circles. And please give me one quote–only one–from Buchanan that supports your claim of his “supposed racism” and that he was “a man influenced by slave-owners.”
Craig
Jan 16 2023 at 1:22pm
Many often opine about the original intent of the 2nd Amendment and as originally drafted the 2A applied solely to the federal government. Indeed, the entirety of the Bill of Rights simply did not apply against the states at all. Of course that brings us to the discussion of the XIV Amendment and its original intent and more specifically with respect to firearms. It was essentially a constitutionally codified Civil Rights Act of 1866 (not 1966!) to prevent easier statutory repeal and of course part of the intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was to prevent the newly reconstructed states from passing laws that would disarm the recently freed slaves from the likes of the original KKK started by Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Jon Murphy
Jan 16 2023 at 1:30pm
This is only tangentally related to your comment, but have you heard the fascinating podcast series on the 14th Amendment on the podcast “Bound by Oath”? It’s all about the history and legal development of the 14th Amendment and its relationship to the other Amendments.
Given your comment here, I strongly suspect you’d find it interesting.
Craig
Jan 16 2023 at 5:11pm
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Jon Murphy
Jan 16 2023 at 1:51pm
I find this post intellectually and morally difficult. I don’t disagree per se, but I don’t fully agree either.
On the one hand, I do sympathize a little with Warren Platts’s comment above.* Violence makes me squeamish. If possible, I would prefer to see a non-violent solution. And maybe that is what Douglass is hoping for: the mere presence of a firearm could de-escalate the situation. Or it could escalate and make the slave hunters more violent. If taken too far, the Rule of Law can break down entirely and the civilization could collapse into a lawless, violent place.
On the other hand, if there is no resistance to State overreach, if things like life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, are not held and defended deeply, they will be lost. To quote one of my favorite singer-songwriters Frank Turner: “If within the smallest battles we surrender to the State/ we enter in a darkness whence we never shall escape.” Violence may be the last refuge and the ultimate check on State overreach.
In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith discusses how the power of the sovereign to compel behavior must be exercised “the greatest delicacy” and “propriety and judgement” (pg 81 of the LF edition). And while justice is one of those virtues that we non-sovereigns can compel from one another, our power to compel must similarly be circumscribed lest we too, like the when the state extends its power too far, become “destructive of all liberty, security, and justice.”
Where those lines are, I do not know. They are probably “loose, vague, and indeterminate.” It’s easy to sit in a comfy chair at a computer in 2023 when my life is not on the line and wax philosophical about violence to defend life.
*Although I wouldn’t go as far as to call defending a person’s life and liberty “terrorism” or argue that the only difference between terrorism and rebellion is critical mass. These terms are distinct and distinct for a reason.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 16 2023 at 2:37pm
Jon: I understand and, to a large extent, share your reservations.
Laurentian
Jan 16 2023 at 2:38pm
There is also the fact that it is a lot easier to say that is okay to shoot or threaten to shoot someone you don’t like 170 years ago rather someone you like or doing so today against a disfavored group.
David Seltzer
Jan 16 2023 at 2:48pm
Jon, I understand your perspective, but from mine, as a one whose early family were victims of the Holocaust, I prefer an armed citizenry. Germany instituted gun control in 1938. Soon after, Hitler killed six million of us, one million Romas, two million dissidents and gay people. The Soviet Union established gun control in 1929. Soon after 20 million dissidents were exterminated. Similar stories in Turkey, China, Cambodia. Of course one would argue; in Britain, citizens are restricted from owning handguns but can own shotguns and there hasn’t been wholesale killing by the state. It’s because, I suspect, rule of law prevails where armed citizens can defend themselves.
Jon Murphy
Jan 16 2023 at 3:19pm
To be clear, I do not dispute the value of an armed citizenry. My concern is about vigilantism.
Jose Pablo
Jan 16 2023 at 1:51pm
“If a large number of slaves (assuming they could have owned or obtained revolvers), escaped slaves, and their supporters had shot a sufficient number of slave owners and slave catchers, they would have abolished slavery”
I don’t know. Spartacus did that back in 73BC. It did not ended as you suggest.
Jose Pablo
Jan 16 2023 at 1:54pm
A lot of slave catchers were “shot” dead, though
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 16 2023 at 2:57pm
Jose: I did write “a sufficient number,” and did mention the difficulty of collective action. Yet, there was a big technological difference between ancient societies and 18th-century America, which is, in the latter, relatively cheap and efficient individual firearms requiring little training. You could argue that this was compensated by the fact that only one-third of American residents were slaves (and, of course, a larger proportion in the confines of the South) while slaves were perhaps 10 times more numerous than citizens in the ancient world–or at least in the ancient city-state. But this did not make collective action easier to organize. (The statistic on slaves in America just before the Civil War is from Jeff Hummel, “Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation,” p. 370.)
John hare
Jan 16 2023 at 3:42pm
I believe it was one third of the population of the south were black. The percentages in the north were far lower.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 16 2023 at 5:49pm
John: Thanks for this correction. You are right, as clearly shown in Hummel’s table on page 370. I don’t think it changes my argument. The theory of collective action implies that organizing a small group is less difficult ceteris paribus, but communications between slaves was impossible or extremely costly.
Jose Pablo
Jan 16 2023 at 4:40pm
My point Pierre was that slavery is an institution with a long history (despite what you can hear nowadays, Americans are far from having a “monopoly” on the history of slavery) and that being this the case, it shoud be possible to verify the validity of your proposition: “If a large number of slaves (assuming they could have owned or obtained revolvers), escaped slaves, and their supporters had shot a sufficient number of slave owners and slave catchers, they would have abolished slavery.” examining the long history of slavery.
AFAIK the only case in which the proposition was proved right was in the Haitian Revolution of 1791* (a, maybe, interesting corollary on this at the end). But unsuccessful slave revolts have been a lot.
Of course, your proposition is smart enough to be very difficult to falsify, lacking precise definitions of “large number” and constrained to them using “revolvers”. But still, I would tend to believe that the lesson of History is that a group of armed slaves revolting against the State is very unlikely to “end well”, and was never (of almost never) the “true remedy” for slavery.
‘* Given the actual situation of the descendants of the slaves revolting in the Haitian Revolution, maybe it was not such a “successful true remedy” after all.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 16 2023 at 6:30pm
Jose: Two points should be noted. A minor one (perhaps) is that you don’t necessarily need specific numbers to have a falsifiable implication. For example: If there is a sufficient number of suppliers, none will influence the market price of a good.
The major point is that I was not necessarily thinking about a group of armes slaves mounting an action together. Collective action includes individual actions, like we see in the coordination of business or union cartels. I think that is consistent with what Douglass was saying. If, say, 5% of slaves having fled to the North had shot “their” slave catchers, a slave catcher would have known that his probability of being shot was 1 on 20, which would certainly have provided an incentive to some of them.
This is analogous to the case of the French National Police conducting rafles of Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris. If only one Jewish household head on 20 had shot a French policeman when the police came to take him and his family away, the police operation planning would have taken this risk into account. Imagine the title in Le Monde in 5% of the operations: “One Agent of the National Police Shot and Killed When Arresting a Jew.” Or even “National Police Has to Call on Gendarmerie Support to Carry Out Arrest of Jews.” Or “Strong Increase in the Number of French Policemen Resigning “.
Mactoul
Jan 16 2023 at 8:32pm
Per Solzhenitsyn an axe would have been sufficient to deter NKVD (per midnight visit). He blames Russians on lacking sufficient civil courage.
Warren Platts
Jan 17 2023 at 12:01pm
That depends a lot on how ruthless the larger society is prepared to be. In a democracy, yes, we can see that in real time as crime rates have significantly increased in the aftermath of the George Floyd fiasco because of police taking extra risk into account.
But in a place like Nazi Germany where those in charge have no compunction about rounding up 100 men, women & children and publicly executing them for every policemen killed, it won’t be long before the populace polices themselves and stop all forms of armed resistance.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 17 2023 at 3:47pm
Warren: Whether or not one “has no compunction” depends on whether whether he expects net benefits.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 18 2023 at 12:10am
Warren: Net benefits for himself of course (on the basis of his own preferences).
Craig
Jan 16 2023 at 9:11pm
Spartacus got greedy? Perhaps sometimes one might know what they’re running from but not necessarily what they are running to.
Laurentian
Jan 16 2023 at 3:01pm
I find the part about “Simple mechanism of incentives” a bit creepy. I mean using violence and threats of violence against Bad People is all well and good but the Bad People can do the same to the Good People but I suppose we just have to hope the Bad People will never succeed at it.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 18 2023 at 1:22pm
Laurentian: We don’t “just have to hope.” From a positive viewpoint, we need to analyze reality as it is, and we rapidly discover that it is not a group of Noble Savages competing to sacrifice themselves for others (like, say, trade union and politicians always do). From a normative viewpoint, we need to defend moral principles compatible with a free society.
Jim Glass
Jan 16 2023 at 9:27pm
It’s interesting to see a libertarian, of all people, endorse the concept that “using enough mortal violence will solve society’s problem.” I wonder what Bryan Caplan would say about this if he were still here?
Maybe he’d say that it is naïve – if not outright negligent – to recommend such a course without warning of the certainty of retributive violence by the other side, in all likelihood in an extreme degree to make the point that ‘nobody had better try this again!’
With enough violent “collective action” by slaves the slavers will go away? How much is enough? Spartacus collected an army of over 100,000 that actually defeated a couple Roman legions in battle. That was some pretty dang impressive collective action! But the Romans weren’t having any of it, and his army wound up slaughtered with 11,000 crucified — 6,000 of them crucified on the road from Capua to Rome for all surviving traveling slaves to see. Point made?
History is full of slave rebellions crushed most brutally to make that same point. In the USA, e.g,..
[] In the 1811 German Coast Louisiana uprising, perhaps 500 slaves acted collectively, killing two white men and burring three plantation houses. The US Army crushed the revolt, killing 40+. Then local officials executed 40+ more — some by beheading with the heads put on pikes for surviving slaves to see. Point made?
[] In Turner’s Rebellion, 1831, rebelling slaves killed about 60 white men, women and children — the most effective collective action by slaves ever. The state militia suppressed them and 56 were executed. Then the local population killed maybe 200 more blacks regardless of whether they had anything to do with the rebellion. Laws then were passed in the south banning slave literacy (Turned was well educated) and repealing what legal rights slaves had. And after Turner was executed, his body was dissected and its parts sold as souvenirs. Point made?
[] And of course John Brown’s famous revolt, 1859. Brown seized a federal armory to provide its weapons to slaves, trying to follow Douglas’s prescription. The US Army suppressed it, 10 killed, seven more quickly hanged.
So slave owners were capable of collective action too, using the Army and government.
Yet incentives work the other way as well, eh? The South had up to 50% of its wealth in slaves, $14 trillion worth (2020 dollars), and its entire social structure was built on them. So the Southerners had a heck of a lot of incentive to keep all that very fully raveled, right?
There is no chance they would have acquiesced to having their slaves be able to walk away from them, just “simply” because somebody started giving ‘revolvers’ to escaped slaves to shoot slave catchers. That’s pure fantasy. (Suffering all the killing and ruin done by all the guns of the Union Army it took them five years to give up slavery! But just shooting slave hunters would’ve done it? Really???)
And there is a very simple alternative you overlook: As per the law, those escaped slaves would now be hunted down not as slaves to be returned to their masters but as murderers to be hung. Perhaps with their gun-providing accomplices beside them. Like John Brown was hung. Done.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Who knows what an alternate history would be like? 🙁
But I advise this: Never urge anyone towards a course of violence without fully considering, and giving full warning about, all the violent blowback that will come from the other side. Not a word of which was discussed here.
Jose Pablo
Jan 16 2023 at 10:11pm
Another example of “self-defense by individuals in persecuted minorities” could be native Americans.
Killing some of the soldiers of the Federal Government harassing them, sure forced the US Army operation planning “to take this risk into account”. Not to the benefit of the armed native Americans, I think.
Lot of unintended consequences seems to follow from the persecuted minorities use of deadly force against their prosecutors.
Craig
Jan 16 2023 at 10:57pm
In the Professor’s post he notes Douglass’ resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act designed to make it more difficult for runaway slaves to seek refuge in the non-slave states. They’d have to make it all the way to Canada. Doing a quick google apparently over the course of time 100,000 slaves successfully ran away. Given the time frame, well, it obviously wasn’t enough to discourage slavery.
So, I’d suggest when you write, “There is no chance they would have acquiesced to having their slaves be able to walk away from them, just “simply” because somebody started giving ‘revolvers’ to escaped slaves to shoot slave catchers.” that you are correct, the existing slaveholders who have invested in slaves aren’t going to just acquiesce.
But the choices aren’t simply between obedience and full blown servile insurrection either. One can at least potentially envision a much more active runaway assistance network. History is history, but let’s say that instead of 100,000, that number were 1,000,000
Whether 1mn runaways would be enough to discourage slavery, I can’t be sure, it never happened, but I can say this, the more slaves that run away (and the fewer they are able to recapture and bring back) the less profitable slavery is and the less likely people invest in it from the get go, or even if they are current slaveholders, to continue to invest in it.
How many slaves ran away only to be caught in PA and returned (even aside from the FSA, the Constitution had a rendition clause)? I have no idea. How many slaves never attempted escape realizing their skin would make them stick out and they thought it impossible to find sanctuary in PA or further north? OH even had anti-black immigration laws at one point to discourage KY runaways.
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2019/10/runaway-how-george-washington-and-other-slave-owners-used-newspapers-to-hunt-escaped-slaves/
“We know where Judge went and the ways in which she was pursued largely through newspaper interviews she gave in the 1840s, when she was in her 70s and technically still a “runaway slave.” She had sailed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to escape. One of Washington’s aides found her there and tried to convince her to return to Mount Vernon. After she rejected his offers, the aide left, but eventually returned to bring her and her infant daughter back by force. That attempt was thwarted, however, and no further attempts followed.”
This was apparently George Washington’s slave who escaped to NH and apparently in 1840s somebody took a shot at bringing her and her daughter back to VA, but the attempt was thwarted though it did not say how. This is before the FSA of 1850.
Make the runaways porcupines and maybe this person thinks twice about even making the attempt.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 17 2023 at 12:37am
Craig: Your reasoning is broadly consistent with economic reasoning, notably your last sentence.
One of my sentences seems to have escaped the attention of some other commenters (emphasis added here):
It is also important for some other commenters to note that collective action as it used by economists consists in individual actions towards a common goal and does not necessarily imply assembling a Spartacus army (see Olson on collective action).
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