Yogi Berra, New York Yankee star catcher from the 1950s and resident philosopher is remembered for seeming misstatements attributed to him that surprisingly ring true. As a historian, my favorite is “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Supposedly Berra was discussing Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle repeatedly hitting back-to-back home runs, something I remember from the 1960 and 1961 baseball seasons.
I was reminded of the Yogi Berra quote while teaching a history class at Hofstra University on New York City and State’s complicated relationship to slavery. Many of the most racist arguments in favor of slavery reappeared as justification for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and throwing the country into a chaotic battle over a woman’s right to reproductive freedom.
In the initial debate over ratification of the United States Constitution and in the earliest years of the new republic, anti-Federalists argued that the Constitution gave the federal, or national government, too much power. Too assuage opponents of ratification, primarily Southerners concerned that a national government dominated by Northerners could restrict or even abolish slavery, the Bill of Rights included in the 10th Amendment that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” the people understood as white male property holders.
Between the late 1820s and 1850, the leading proponent of State’s Rights and defender of slavery was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who served as a member of the House of Representatives, a Senator, a cabinet member, and as Vice-President of the United States. Calhoun believed the Southern slave system was a “positive good” and vehemently opposed any national interference with slavery, arguing that although the Preamble to the Constitution opens with the phrase “We the people,” “States, not the people, have the principal share in forming the Federal Government.” While Calhoun claimed to be a friend of Union, as early as 1837, while Vice-President of the United States, he told Southerners not to compromise on sectional issues and he threatened civil war and secession unless the North accepted and the federal government protected Southern institutions.
New York State likes to celebrate that it was a route on the Underground Railroad and a home base for a number of prominent anti-slavery activists including Frederick Douglass, Francis and William Seward, Harriet Tubman, Lewis and Arthur Tappan, David Ruggles, Henry Ward Beecher, and Henry Highland Garnet. However, it also was a financial center for the processing, sale, and shipping of slave-produced commodities, an outfitter for the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade, and a major Copperhead Democrat bastion during the Civil War. In the 1862 mid-term elections, anti-war Democrats swept every ward in New York City, Democratic Party candidate Horatio Seymour was elected governor, and former New York City Mayor Fernando Wood was elected to Congress.
Fernando Wood epitomized the worst of New York’s complicity with slavery. As Mayor, in his January 1861 report to the New York City Common Council, he proposed that the city secede from the United States along with the South to better maintain profitable commercial ties and in 1864, while serving in the House of Representatives, Wood led the New York delegation’s opposition to the 13th Amendment that would end slavery in the United States because it would make it impossible for Southern planters to repay their debts to New York City merchants. Later, in a statement that sounds a lot like future inflammatory Marjorie Taylor Greene posts on Twitter, Wood called Reconstruction proposals “a bill without a title, a child without a name and probably without a father, a monstrosity, a measure the most infamous of the many infamous acts of this infamous Congress,” s statement that led to him being censured.
In debate over the 13th Amendment, Congressman John Winthrop Chanler of New York City, a Wood ally, was the principal spokesperson for representatives who opposed a Constitutional ban on slavery. In May 1866 he called advocates for Congressional Reconstruction “wicked and revolutionary” and House members who voted to overturn Presidential vetoes “malignant and mischievous,” statements that would definitely align him with the MAGA Republican House Freedom Caucus today. Chanler opposed the 13th Amendment because it would deny the “offspring” of Southern planters “the right of inheritance” and civil rights legislation as an “insult to the white citizens of the United States” because “areas dominated by Blacks were receding into “semi-barbarism.” According to Chanler, if equal rights were written into the Constitution with the 14th Amendment, “‘the people’ will be made to include the negro race throughout the Union, and thereby pervert the intention of the framers of the Constitution.” Chanler also opposed extending the right to vote to Black Civil War veterans. For Chanler, the goal of the federal government should be to protect “the purity of the white race, the representation of the white race, and the sovereignty of this people.”
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization et al., when the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and national protection for reproductive freedom, the Court’s majority embraced the long-discredited states’ rights arguments used to defend slavery and justify racism. The Court majority determined that abortion rights should be decided by individual states, just as Calhoun argued the right to own and exploit other human beings should be left up to the individual states to determine. In response to the Supreme Court decision, presumptive Republican Presidential candidate also embraced a states’ rights stance.
“It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
