1. This sort of thing gets to my quarrel with the term "white privilege," as if the protection of the laws is a bad thing we should dispense with, rather than a right we should expand & guarantee on an equal basis.
2. America was founded on what the Founding Fathers saw as the natural rights of all Englishmen - but with the twist of defining those rights as God-given & universal to all.
3. Nothing is more central to America than the natural rights of individuals. The long American debate has been about expanding those rights from universal in theory to universal in practice. Reframing them as privilege - a privilege it is unjust to enjoy - opposes all that.
4. One of the corrosive things about slavery in the world of political ideas was how it increasingly made its defenders skeptical of claims of universal rights, precisely because they implied that those rights should not be white privileges. Example:
5. After the failed 1848 revolutions, Whigs & Northern Democrats honored Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian republican leader. Lewis Cass authored a resolution denouncing Austrian & Russian repression. Sec. State Daniel Webster wrote a pro-Kossuth biography.
6. But Kossuth was received coolly in the South. Sen. Robert MT Hunter (D-VA, later a Confederate) complained that Cass was meddling in Austria's internal affairs. Hunter feared embracing even universal *white* republicanism due to its implications for slavery.
7. Hunter & other Calhounist apologists had fallen far from the visions of even Founding-era slaveholders - rather than proclaim & principle & admit it then had exceptions in practice, they drifted towards letting the practice redefine & water down the principle.
8. It is literally un-American & anti-American to view the natural rights of all human beings as unjust privileges to be renounced. That way does not lie liberty or equality, but merely a Hobbesian test of strength. I want no part of it.
9. Precisely. The Cornerstone speech & the "mudsills" theory were all about claiming that liberty could exist only as a racial privilege for some at the expense of others, not a right for all. That was the struggle over the meaning of republicanism underlying the Civil War.
