THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, December 1, 2020 |A
México
Libre
South to Freedom
By Alice L. Baumgartner
(Basic, 365 pages, $32)BOOKSHELF| By Andrew R. Graybill
I
n the summer of 1835, a slave named Jean Antoine
managed to sneak into the sweltering hold of a Mexican
vessel while it was docked in New Orleans. Concealed
amid the cargo, with any noises he made muffled by the surf,
the fugitive eluded capture during the11-day voyage across
the Gulf of Mexico. At some point en route, however, the
ship’s captain detected the presence of the stowaway, and
upon reaching the port of Campeche he enlisted the help of
its mayor in locating the unbidden guest. The fugitive was
apprehended onboard by local police and transported to the
United States, arriving back at the Crescent City three
months after his getaway. But during the handover to
American authorities, Jean Antoine brandished a knife and
stabbed himself several times. He died from his injuries
within a day.
Gripping and poignant stories such as this animate Alice L.
Baumgartner’s “South to Freedom.” The author—a historian at
the University of Southern California—argues for the impor-
tance of Mexico in the coming
of the U.S. Civil War, focusing
on a pair of overlapping story-
lines. The first and fresher of
these explores the desperate
attempts of individuals like
Jean Antoine to escape enslave-
ment by fleeing to Mexico,
where they sought protection
from a neighboring republic
increasingly hostile to the
peculiar institution, a state of
affairs that angered and frus-
trated American slaveowners.
The second storyline examines
how the U.S. military conquest of
the Mexican north in 1848 helped
precipitate the U.S. sectional
crisis, as advocates and opponents
of slavery split bitterly over what labor system should prevail
in the American Southwest. That divide, of course, brought on
the cataclysm that erupted in April 1861, which would end
legalized slavery in the United States and redefine what it
means to be a U.S. citizen.
As Ms. Baumgartner explains, unlike the famous route
leading north of the Mason-Dixon Line, “there was no official
Underground Railroad to Mexico,” and the estimated 3 to 5
thousand slaves who absconded there used various means of
escape. “They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning
wigs from horsehair and pitch. They stole horses, firearms,
skiffs, dirk knives, [and] fur hats,” and then slipped away.
Beyond its mere proximity, Mexico appealed to the runaways
because, in the years following its independence from Spain,
the new nation passed laws limiting slavery. By 1837, having
lost Texas (which had rebelled two years earlier in large part
to preserve bondage), Mexico abolished the practice entirely.
Two decades later, as part of the Constitution of 1857, Mexi-
can delegates went one step further, guaranteeing freedom to
all slaves who reached Mexican soil and outlawing extradition.
By contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that same year,
inDred Scott v. Sandford, that African-Americans had no
right to citizenship under the Constitution.Escaped slaves found challenging circumstances awaiting
them in Mexico. For one thing, the newcomers faced limited
prospects for work—usually service in a military outpost on
the nation’s ragged (and much-raided) northern frontier, or
low-paying jobs as domestic help or in the trades. Moreover,
in some places employment conditions were exploitative
enough to resemble the very enslavement they had dodged in
the first place. On the other hand, the runaways enjoyed basic
legal protections unavailable to them in the U.S. and were
often absorbed into local communities, which sometimes rose
in their defense against incursions by kidnappers or slave-
catchers. Such was the case in 1851, for instance, when the
residents of a small town just below the U.S.-Mexico border
drove off a Texan trying to seize two black ranch hands,
conjuringsimilar—and often celebrated—episodes in the
antebellum North. Even after the Civil War and the abolition
of slavery in the United States, some of the runaways chose
to remain in Mexico, wheretheir descendants live today.
There is much to admire in “South to Freedom,” starting
with Ms. Baumgartner’s dogged and extensive binational
research. Unlike many experts who study the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands, she has crafted her book from Mexican as well
as American archival collections, and she is deeply versed in
the secondary historical literature of both countries. Further-
more, she toggles deftly between smaller and larger frames,
setting individual stories against the wider sweep of events
taking place across North America. And Ms. Baumgartner is a
fluid writer, with a natural gift for structure and pacing as
well as the nicely turned phrase, among them her description
of the Yucatán Peninsula as curved “like a beckoning finger.”
Some of Ms. Baumgartner’s fellow scholars will be well
acquainted with various aspects of her narrative. Historians
have considered the lure of Mexico for runaway slaves since
at least the 1970s, with a surge in recent years of books and
articles probing the subject. Likewise, the importance of
Mexican debates over slavery and their implications for U.S.
politics and society have drawn important attention of late,
especially from scholars investigating the extension of the
cotton-slavery complex from the American South into Texas,
which began as early as the 1820s. And many readers—
academic and otherwise—will recognize the contours of the
major incidents recounted here, including the Missouri
Compromise, the Texas Revolution, the dispute over the
Wilmot Proviso, and the ill-fated French invasion of Mexico
in the 1860s.
“South to Freedom” is at its best when Ms. Baumgartner
describes, with skill and great sensitivity, the experiences of
those enslaved men and women who, in resisting their
oppression, bravely quit the United States altogether. Their
stories challenge the glib assumption held by many Ameri-
cans—those of the 19th century as well as the 21st—who have
long taken for granted the idea of Mexican national inferiority.
Most of all, their accounts serve as a stark reminder of the
severely circumscribed nature of liberty in the antebellum
United States and its tragic costs not only for the enslaved
but also the republic itself.Mr. Graybill is a professor of history and director of the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern
Methodist University.The little-told story of runaway slaves in Mexico,
and of relations between the U.S. and its
southern neighbor in the antebellum period.Ancient History Isn’t Colonialism
I
s there room for ancient
history in the Ivy League?
A group called Decoloni-
zation at Brown doesn’t think
so. It demands the university
tear down statues of two Ro-
man emperors, Caesar Augus-
tus and Marcus Aurelius, on
the ground that they “cele-
brate ongoing colonialism in
the United States and idealize
white, Western civilization—
both of which continue to
cause harm at Brown today,”
as four of the decolonizers
put it in an op-ed for the stu-
dent newspaper, the Brown
Daily Herald.
That’s nonsense. White su-
premacy didn’t emerge until
the 17th century, when mod-
ern science gave rise to theo-
ries about human races. The
emperors’ legacies represent
some of civilization’s greatest
virtues.
And the Roman Empire had
little in common with modern
colonial ones. Caesar Augus-
tus, the first Roman emperor,
established the Pax Romana, a
two-century period of peace
and stability among the peo-
ple of the empire. That peace
was assured through con-
quest, but Roman subjects
were citizens with all the
rights and duties that it en-
tailed, unlike in modern colo-
nialism. He guaranteed that
the government’s ultimate
power rested with the Roman
Senate, the legislative assem-
blies and executive magis-
trates. “When the dictatorship
was offered to me, both in my
presence and my absence, by
the people and senate,” he
wrote, “I did not accept it.”
These actions find modern
echoes in the postwar (and
anticolonialist) Pax Ameri-
cana and the U.S. Constitu-
tion’s checks and balances.
Marcus Aurelius was
known for philosophical
works that drew on his lead-
ership experience. His writ-
ings encourage living in the
present, nonjudgment andself-control. His best-known
book is “Meditations,” a
founding text of Stoic philos-
ophy. Its ideas gave rise to
virtue ethics, a normative
theory that stresses wisdom,
courage, justice and temper-
ance.Marcus was also a skilled
warrior and military com-
mander, leading the Roman
Empire to many victories
against Germanic tribes. The
Romans saw these white
Northern Europeans as physi-
cally strong warriors but cul-
turally inferior, with their
brutish and violent manners—
much as white colonizers mil-
lennia later would regard
their subjects.Not everyone at Brown
wants to tear the statues
down. “Engaging in debate
on the meaning of the stat-
ues is an important conver-
sation,” says historian
Dietrich Nuemann, “but re-
moving them deprives us of
that conversation.”
“Students are afraid of ex-
pressing themselves to keep
the statues,” Nidhi Bhaskar,
21, an archaeology and public-
policy major, told me. “Only
online on anonymous forums
students feel that they can
express their sentiments
freely.”
In her own op-ed for the
Herald, she urged the univer-
sity to uphold “the tenets of
free inquiry and the preserva-
tion of nuance within the ex-
ploration of historical relics.”
Or, as Marcus Aurelius put it,
“The best revenge is to be un-
like him who performed the
injury.”Ms. Bocchi is the Journal’s
Joseph A. Rago Fellow.By Alessandra Bocchi
Students at Brown
nonsensically accuse
Roman emperors
of ‘white supremacy.’OPINION
Donald
Trump’s name
isn’t on the
Jan. 5 runoff
ballot for
Georgia’s two
Senate races.
But no one
has a greater
interest than
the president
in seeing Re-
publicans take at least one of
these seats—and keep their
majority in the U.S. Senate.
Because the first thing
Democrats plan to do come
January is start erasing Mr.
Trump’s legacy. Absent a Re-
publican Senate, there will be
little to stop whatever ap-
pointments Mr. Biden may
make or whatever legislative
agenda he pushes through.
The two Georgia Republi-
cans running are Sens. Kelly
Loeffler and David Perdue.
They are being challenged, re-
spectively, by Democrats Ra-
phael Warnock and Jon Os-
soff. Given that the last Peach
State Democrat elected to the
Senate was Zell Miller in
2000, Republicans might in a
normal year be expected to
win fairly handily.
Then again, 2020 is not a
normal year.
With the president’s law-
yers still contesting the Geor-
gia election results, a split has
opened in Republican ranks.
On Thanksgiving the president
called the Georgia Republican
who certifies those results,
Secretary of State Brian
Raffensperger, an “enemy of
the people.” On Sunday he fol-
lowed up by saying he was
“ashamed” he’d ever endorsed
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
Attacks on fellow Republi-
Trump’s March to Atlanta
cans are nothing new for
President Trump. The danger
this time, however, is that
they will sour the nearly 2.
million Georgians who voted
for him on the Republican
Party, discouraging them from
coming out in January to vote
for its two candidates. Unfor-
tunately, this is precisely
what one of the president’s
lawyers, Lin Wood, has urged
Georgia’s Trump supporters
to do. “Threaten to withhold
your votes & money,” he
wrote on Twitter, unless Ms.
Loeffler and Mr. Perdue do
more to fix the “steal of the
11/3 GA election.”
Mr. Trump, by contrast,
seems to appreciate that a de-
feat for these two Republicans
would be a defeat for himself.
Two weeks ago he tweeted, “I
strongly stand with Kelly &
David. They are both great
and MUST WIN!” The day af-
ter Thanksgiving, he reiter-
ated his claim that Joe Biden’s
victory is a “total scam” but
added that “we must get out
and help David and Kelly, two
GREAT people. Otherwise we
are playing right into the
hands of some very sick peo-
ple. I will be in Georgia on
Saturday!”
Donald Trump Jr. clearly
intends to make himself felt in
Georgia as well. A week ago
he tweeted that it was “NON-
SENSE” for “people that are
supposed to be on our side”
to be “telling GOP voters not
to go out and vote for
@KLoeffler and @PerdueSen-
ate.” On Monday Mr. Trump
Jr. backed up his words with
the launch of the Save the U.S.
Senate super PAC, which will
run ads in Georgia encourag-
ing Trump voters to back theRepublicans on Jan. 5.
In the meantime, Mr.
Trump will be in Georgia Sat-
urday because he knows the
outcomes of these runoff
races will help determine the
fate of the Biden presidency. A
Republican Senate wouldn’t
only nix Mr. Biden’s more am-
bitious spending plans—e.g., a
big fat climate package—but
also create an incentive for
Mr. Biden to reach deals by
nominating more moderate
judges and executive branch
officials. Some even speculate
Mr. Biden wouldprefera Re-
publican Senate as a card he
could play against the party’s
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing
when it pushes him too far.Mr. Trump’s interest in a
Republican Senate is more
fundamental. Over the past
four years he has built a solid
legacy of achievement—cut-
ting taxes, deregulating the
economy, appointing good
judges to the federal bench,
getting three of his nominees
seated on the Supreme Court
and so on. These are all things
Democrats have vowed to re-
verse, and many have said
that if they’re unable to do it
by ordinary legislation, they’ll
resort to radical measures
such as abolishing the filibus-
ter, packing the Supreme
Court, and admitting new
(Democratic) states to the
union.These also happen to be
things that would be hard to
get through a Senate run by
Mitch McConnell. He wouldn’t
be able to block everything.
But he would be in a position
to stop the worst, and in so
doing, preserve many of Mr.
Trump’s most significant
achievements.
All this explains why the
Georgia runoffs are rightly be-
ing treated as a second presi-
dential election. As much as
the outcome will affect Mr. Bi-
den’s future, what Mr. Trump
does in Georgia will also give
us an insight about how he in-
tends to use his influence go-
ing forward. If the goal is to
run again in 2024, surely
working for Republican victo-
ries in Georgia and elsewhere
opens a more promising path
than spending the next four
years in Hillary Clinton-style
loser mode.
As Mr. Trump admitted to
reporters on Thanksgiving, it’s
going to be “a very hard
thing” for him to concede. But
Georgia’s Senate runoffs offer
him a twofer. Not only would
Republican victories in Geor-
gia help prevent the Biden ad-
ministration from reversing
his achievements; they also
offer him the opportunity to
go out on a winning note.
Mr. Biden and the Demo-
crats campaigned on a clear
theme: We’re the anti-Trump
party, and when we get power
our goal will be to undo ev-
erything he did. Right now
Mitch McConnell is their most
formidable obstacle. And
keeping him Senate majority
leader is President Trump’s
best bet for preserving his
own legacy.
Write to [email protected].No one has a bigger
stake in keeping the
Senate Republican
than the president.MAIN
STREET
By William
McGurn
As European
diplomats
haggled over
the threat-
ened Polish
and Hungar-
ian vetoes
that could
block the
Covid bailout
plan so labo-
riously nego-
tiated earlier in the year, Por-
tugal’s Socialist Prime
Minister António Costa took
the occasion to propose a plan
to shrink and simplify the Eu-
ropean Union.
To make Europe work, he
says, the countries that genu-
inely care about European val-
ues need to slough off the un-
believers. The remnant would
be a smaller but purer group
of countries ready to build the
kind of “ever deeper union” of
which EU founders like Jean
Monnet and Robert Schumann
dreamed. As Mr. Costa puts it,
“Basically, it is whether the
European Union is a union of
values, or whether, on the
contrary, it is primarily an
economic instrument to gen-
erate economic value.”
It is a noble-sounding idea,
but it is not exactly correct.
Under Mr. Costa’s proposed
strategy, the EU might or
might not become a “union of
values.” But it would become
a much more efficient eco-
nomic instrument to transfer
economic resources to Mr.
Costa’s constituents.
Mr. Costa, whose thinking
about Europe is said to be
Germany Won’t Take Portugal’s EU Split
close to that of French Presi-
dent Emmanuel Macron, has
two groups of countries in
mind when he speaks of the
backsliders who fail to em-
brace European values. One
group, the “Illiberal East,” as
we can call them, are coun-
tries like Poland and Hungary
that dissent from conven-
tional EU orthodoxy on topics
ranging from migration to gay
rights—and whose govern-
ments have been widely criti-
cized in Europe and beyond
for undermining democracy
through restrictive media
laws and other stratagems.The other basket of deplor-
ables Mr. Costa wants to toss
is perhaps more surprising:
the so-called Frugal Four (the
Netherlands, Denmark, Aus-
tria and Sweden), which want
to hold the lid on EU spending
and don’t like Brussels-funded
bailouts. Mr. Costa tries to
draw a parallel between the
Frugal Four’s alleged disre-
gard of the core European
value of solidarity with the Il-
liberals’ disregard of democ-
racy and rule of law.
Cynics will note here that
countries that Mr. Costa
wishes to reject have another
feature in common: Theystand between Portugal and
money. The ex-Warsaw Pact
countries in the East are the
chief rivals for EU funds to
the Club Med countries of the
South, and the Frugal Four
are the tightwads who want
to keep Brussels spending
low—and to attach all kinds of
irritating conditionalities to
any bailouts.
One can’t blame Mr. Costa
for wrapping an ambition so
practical in rhetoric so grand;
a large part of political lead-
ership involves the develop-
ment of elevated political lan-
guage for humdrum and
sometimes even sordid goals.
When you are a socialist, and
you have—as Margaret
Thatcher warned that you
would—run out of other peo-
ple’s money, words like “soli-
darity” and “values” come
naturally to mind.
France, which has long sup-
ported the idea of a smaller,
tighter European core, will be
happy with this approach—a
win for Mr. Costa, who needs
Paris’s support if (as is ru-
mored) he nurses ambitions
for a senior policy-making
role in Brussels. But Mr.
Costa’s speech is unlikely to
have much impact where it re-
ally matters: Berlin.
Germany likes the EU as it
is. The divisions between the
Frugal Four, Club Med and the
Illiberal East help give Berlin
the deciding vote in European
affairs—and German political,
economic and security inter-
ests all point to keeping the
EU membership as is. Ger-mans can see the traps
Messrs. Costa and Macron are
somewhat transparently con-
structing, and neither Angela
Merkel nor any of her poten-
tial successors have the
slightest intention of stepping
into them.
Europe’s biggest headache
isn’t Mr. Costa’s call for funda-
mental change. It isn’t the
constant French scheming. It
isn’t even the imbroglio over
Polish and Hungarian resis-
tance to the legislation needed
to complete the EU-funded
Covid bailout. It’s ultimately
the belief of so many Europe-
ans that their countries can
indefinitely embrace a policy
of “values” which somehow al-
ways seems to involve trans-
fers of resources from produc-
tive to less productive actors
in the economy.
Mr. Costa and his fellow
Europeans aren’t wrong to
care about social spending or
the needs of the poor. They
aren’t even wrong to point
out that doctrinaire versions
of laissez-faire policies often
fall short in the real world.
But where they do go seri-
ously and grievously wrong is
in forgetting that economic
value is the value on which
the others ultimately depend.
A Europe that fails to excel
economically cannot excel so-
cially. The Frugal Four aren’t
infallible when it comes to
policy choices, but they aren’t
betraying Europe when they
talk about responsible budget-
ing and conditionality. They
aretryingtosaveit.Prime Minister Costa
veils his plan with
pretty words about
European values.GLOBAL
VIEW
By Walter
Russell Mead