In March 2019, London’s Tate Museums and National Portrait Gallery and New York’s Guggenheim Museum announced that they would no longer accept philanthropic gifts from the Sackler family. These announcements came in the wake of dramatic protests at Sackler-funded art institutions in New York, Washington, DC, Boston, and Paris, all criticizing Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic. Activists scattered fake prescriptions and empty pill bottles across gallery floors and lay down in staged “die-ins.” Many of the protests were led by the art photographer Nan Goldin, who disclosed that she was herself recovering from an addiction to OxyContin, which had been prescribed to her for wrist pain (Walters Reference Walters2019).Footnote 1 Museums, galleries, and universities face ongoing calls publicly to refuse Sackler gifts and to return previously accepted ones. Activists’ rhetoric, and public discussion of the controversy, highlight concerns about the provenance of the Sackler family’s wealth with ample references to “dirty money,” “drug money,” “tainted money,” and “blood money.”
In ordinary discourse, “dirty money” can refer both to money that was acquired through morally unacceptable activities, transactions, or relationships and to money accepted from people guilty of serious wrongdoing (even where the wrongdoing is not the source of their wealth).Footnote 2 The two kinds of case raise parallel questions: When does accepting philanthropic gifts implicate receiving institutions in a donor’s wrongdoing? When should institutions refuse donations because of concerns about the money’s provenance or the giver’s history? Obviously, concerns about a receiving institution’s public image might supply prudential reasons to refuse controversial gifts (whether or not those reasons are outweighed by the potential benefits of accepting them). The moral reasons to refuse or return dirty money can be more difficult to specify but, depending on their strength and scope, might call a great deal of current philanthropic practice into question.Footnote 3
Criticism of “tainted” donations is widespread but contested. In his preface to Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw treats worries about dirty money as naïve, sanctimonious, and socially counterproductive; he quotes approvingly a member of the Salvation Army who wrote to affirm that “they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God’s” (Shaw [1907] Reference Shaw2012, xix). Similarly, by the lights of the effective altruism movement, the problem is not that museums were receiving Sackler money but that museums were receiving Sackler money. An individual or institution should accept money if they can do good with it (relative to the relevant alternatives). Refusal or criticism of gifts may be appropriate when the good that an institution does or can do with the money is negligible. But it would be self-indulgent to prevent “dirty money” from doing good out of an exaggerated concern for keeping one’s own hands clean. Call this the puritanical critique.
A second family of reactions objects less to puritanism than to hypocrisy, or to the selective or opportunistic deployment of the dirty money charge. Why single out the Sacklers for public opprobrium and not, say, tobacco or coal money? Is it even possible to draw a coherent distinction between clean and dirty money when a society’s distribution of wealth and power is seriously unjust? Perhaps worries about dirty money direct our attention to the wrong place: to the epiphenomena of injustice rather than its roots. Many people are uncomfortable with practices of public shaming in any case; if we do not see critics of dirty money rigorously applying similar standards across cases, this may add to our discomfort and generate additional worries about scapegoating. Call this the consistency critique.
In what follows, I recover a distinctive position on dirty money, capable of responding to both critiques, from the early speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass. On his first trip overseas, to Great Britain and Ireland from 1845–47, Douglass focused much of his oratory and activism on denouncing tainted donations. In a series of speeches, he pressed the claim that “The Free Church of Scotland has made itself responsible for slavery” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979h, 241) by soliciting and accepting donations from American slaveholders and pro-slavery American churches. The accusation became the leading motif of the speeches on Douglass’s British and especially Scottish tour and fueled a public campaign to “Send Back the Bloodstained Money”: Douglass encouraged audiences to chant “Send Back the Money!” at meetings and to shout it in the streets, and he personally helped to carve the slogan into the turf of Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano overlooking Edinburgh (Shepperson Reference Shepperson1951, 128; Whyte Reference Whyte2012, 80).Footnote 4
Douglass would later write that the Free Church had “put it out of the power of the Scotch people to ask the old question, which we in the north have often most wickedly asked—What have we to do with slavery?” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass and Gates1994b, 381). The Free Church’s acceptance of dirty money “brought up the whole question of slavery, and opened the way to its full discussion, without any agency of mine” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass and Gates1994b, 381–2). But this is false modesty: if anything put it out of the power of the Scottish people to disclaim connection with slavery, it was Douglass’s rhetorical efforts during his stay.
Douglass’s Scottish speeches make a number of charges that would be at home in contemporary debates: that a receiving institution has leant itself to corrupt reputation laundering, that it has made itself complicit in wrongdoing, that its actions evince a culpable disregard for the donors’ victims. His rhetoric in these speeches also seems vulnerable to both the puritanical critique and the consistency critique; indeed, defenders of the Free Church deployed versions of each. They maintained that good might come from Free Church engagement with American churches and also complained that the “dirty money” charge was deployed selectively—that Douglass and other activists fixed on some kinds of financially transmitted guilt while ignoring others.
I argue that Douglass’s position is less puritanical and more consistent than it might appear. It also avoids a fetishistic interpretation of money itself as inherently clean or dirty. Rather, Douglass’s focus is on the ways that financial transactions shape social and political relationships and people’s judgments. For Douglass, the diagnosis of and appropriate response to dirty money depend on political context, as transactions that may look similar from the point of view of individual morality or applied ethics might have very different political effects. Douglass argues that (a) accepting money and other gifts can unjustly elevate the social and political status of some parties and unjustly ignore or undermine the status of others and (b) accepting dirty money can subvert appropriate forms of political judgment by motivating attempts to rationalize and defend unjust political consequences and relationships. Douglass’s criticism of objectionable gifts responds to both problems: it reasserts morally appropriate conceptions of political status and political relationships and disrupts processes of rationalization, shaping people’s political judgments for the better. Douglass’s position is therefore forward rather than backward-looking, not merely opportunistic but attentive to opportunities for moral and political progress in ways that may be overlooked by those disposed to treat worries about dirty money as overblown. Revisiting Douglass’s interventions in the Free Church controversy also reveals the fruitfulness of attending to “political craft” and activist practice as sources, and not mere illustrations, of normative theoretical insights (Valdez Reference Valdez2019, 8).
I begin by briefly explaining the Free Church controversy and its resonance with then-established themes in Douglass’s writing and oratory. Next, I show how Douglass’s charges against the Free Church might appear vulnerable to the puritanical and consistency critiques and examine the assumptions that each critique makes about the goals of dirty money rhetoric. I then reconstruct Douglass’s criticism of the Free Church and show how his diagnosis of the problem shapes his rhetorical response to it, including his use of narrative and imagery. I conclude with some reflections on how Douglass’s arguments shed light on contemporary debates.
Douglass and the Free Church
The Free Church of Scotland was established in 1843, when Thomas Chalmers and other evangelical ministers left the General Assembly of the national Church of Scotland. At the time, Scotland had some 1,200 ministers; over a third joined the newly-formed Free Church, as did up to half of the Scottish laypeople (Blight Reference Blight2018, 156). The new church was faced with an immediate need for funds and, in 1844, sent emissaries to the United States to solicit donations. They succeeded in obtaining about £3,000, chiefly from southern donors (Shepperson Reference Shepperson1951, 126).
The fundraising operation was controversial almost from the start. As early as April 1844, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society criticized the Free Church’s fundraising, pointing to American churches’ complicity with slavery (Pettinger Reference Pettinger, Rice and Crawford1999, 32). Garrisonian abolitionists—including Henry Clarke Wright, who had been in Europe (and sending dispatches to The Liberator) since 1843—likewise called for the Free Church to return the money and repudiate its connections with American churches (Pettinger Reference Pettinger, Rice and Crawford1999, 32; Shepperson Reference Shepperson1951, 126–7). In January 1846, Wright was joined in Scotland by two other Garrisonian activists: James Buffum and Frederick Douglass.
Douglass was entering a new stage in his career. He had escaped from slavery in 1838 and had been affiliated with Garrison and working as an antislavery lecturer since 1841. In 1845, at the age of 27, he published the first of his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Shortly after, he set sail for Ireland and thence for Great Britain; he would spend nearly two years overseas before returning to the United States. The trip was at once a book and lecture tour directed at mustering international support for the abolitionist cause and a prudent response to the increased publicity—and the attendant risks to Douglass—that followed the publication of the Narrative.
In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass writes, “The main object to which my labors in Great Britain were directed, was the concentration of the moral and religious sentiment of its people against American slavery” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass and Gates1994b, 378). His letters from Scotland attest to his early recognition of the Free Church’s conduct as creating a political opportunity:
The present position of the free church in Scotland makes it important to expend as much labor here as possible… . Our efforts are directed to making them disgorge their ill-gotten gain—return it to the Slaveholders. Our rallying cry is “No union with Slaveholders and send back the bloodstained money.” Under these rallying cries, old Scotland boils like a pot. (Douglass Reference Douglass and McKivigan2009a, 90)
As the report of “our rallying cry” makes clear, the “Send Back the Money” campaign can be understood as an application of more general Garrisonian positions on the priority of moral suasion—persuasive rhetoric aiming to reach the public’s conscience and to awaken moral sentiments in favor of abolition (Boxill Reference Boxill1995; Kirkland Reference Kirkland, Lawson and Kirkland1999)—and on the obligation to dissociate oneself from slavery and avoid complicity with it. The latter meant, among other things, refusing to participate in the American political system (under a putatively pro-slavery Constitution) and refusing fellowship to pro-slavery churches.Footnote 5 As Douglass framed the Free Church issue for Garrison, in a letter from Scotland: “It is the same old question of Christian union with slaveholders—old with us, but new with most people here” (Douglass Reference Douglass and McKivigan2009b, 109).
Garrisonians and abolitionists generally were concerned with churches’ complicity in slavery’s popular respectability and so in its survival. But Douglass makes some distinctive claims, grounded in his own experience, about how that complicity operates at the level of moral psychology. In the Narrative, he makes the striking announcement that “of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Gates1994a, 68). In addition to the generalization, he cites a treatment effect. In 1832, Thomas Auld (at that time Douglass’s legal owner) experienced a religious conversion and, according to Douglass, became “a much worse man after his conversion than before,” because “after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Gates1994a, 52). Douglass argues that religion exacerbates slaveholders’ cruelty by supplying them with spurious justifications for it. He notes, by way of contrast, his comparatively favorable estimation of one slaveholder who at least had the “great advantage” that he “made no pretentions to, or profession of, religion” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Gates1994a, 68). The point is not only that this irreligious slaveholder avoided the obvious vice of hypocrisy: on Douglass’s analysis, he also escaped at least one corrosive influence on his moral sentiments. Douglass’s later autobiographies make more extensive use of his experience as a slave and fugitive to ground conceptual analysis (Bromell Reference Bromell2011; Roberts Reference Roberts2015, 53–88) and to explore and challenge the ways that slavery and white supremacy find social and political support (Bennet Reference Bennett2016; Gooding-Williams Reference Gooding-Williams2011). But as early as the Narrative, and certainly in his Scottish speeches, Douglass analyzes religion as a social practice through which political injustices can be reproduced and justified, both in public and at the level of individual rationalization. The Free Church controversy gave Douglass further evidence for this analysis and the occasion to extend it to philanthropic practices.
Purity and Consistency in Dirty Money Rhetoric
Douglass’s criticism of the Free Church invites two objections that I want to reject.
What I have called the puritanical objection charges “dirty money” critics with a culpable indifference to consequences: in particular, to the good that might come from accepting “tainted” donations. On this interpretation, opposition to dirty money represents a kind of moral absolutism that may be self-indulgent when applied to oneself and inappropriately scolding when applied to others. The (real or imagined) puritan about dirty money says: accepting blood money (always) means being defiled by the association, and this moral defilement is significant enough to outweigh any apparent reasons in favor of accepting the money. Both premises are contestable—and, often, contested.
Douglass certainly deploys rhetoric of defilement: for example, in references to “filthy lucre” and to the Free Church taking “the price of blood” into its treasury (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979m, 356; Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979q, 452). In Dundee, Scotland, on January 30, he began by reading from the Book of Isaiah (I:4–20): “Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity… . when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979a, 146–47). Isaiah addresses Israel, but the identity of the “sinful nation” that Douglass apostrophizes is initially unclear: he could be denouncing Scotland, America, or both. Having completed his reading, he gives it a more specific interpretation: “In the single line ‘your hands are full of blood’ we have the character of the American Churches aptly described. Their hands are full of blood” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979a, 147). And yet the Free Church “leave their homes and go to the United States, and strike hands in good Christian fellowship” with such men (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979a, 149). This, it seems, is the moment when the blood stain is transmitted from American to Scottish hands.
At this stage Douglass’s rhetoric might seem puritanical in stressing the value of keeping one’s own hands clean (or removing a moral stain). “Send back the money” appears to be backward-looking and nonconsequentialist in its warrant, pointing to the wrongfulness of profiting from theft or other injustices or of making oneself an accessory after the fact. Douglass’s Scottish speeches routinely make both charges: that the money was not properly the slaveholders’ in the first place and the Free Church had therefore received stolen goods (e.g., Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979d, 191; Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979k, 337; Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979q, 452–53)Footnote 6 and that Free Church leaders were “not only guilty of keeping bad company” but were “making themselves a party to its actions” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 182). In making these charges, he presents the Free Church’s acceptance of southern money as morally contaminating, independent of its (other) effects.
But what a puritanical attitude misses, according to critics, is the real chance that good might come from accepting dirty money. The Free Church was not saving lives (or perhaps even many souls, relative to the status quo ante), and so some consequentialist arguments for accepting tainted donations will lack force here. (This is not to say that even a stronger consequentialist case would have moved all of the Garrisonian campaigners: Wright would later denounce Irish Quakers for accepting famine relief from the American South; Rice Reference Rice1981, 142.) The goal that Douglass articulates—to have the Free Church give up the money and “return it to the Slaveholders” (Reference Douglass and McKivigan2009a, 90)—might give anyone pause. Granting that the money in question was stolen, this would mean returning it to the thieves rather than to their victims. Worse, any money returned might well be used to enslave more people: it is conceivable that, by retaining the money, the Free Church not only put it to good use but also diverted it from evil ones.
Some authors have found Douglass’s arguments uncharitable to the rationales that the Free Church offered not only for taking the money off slaveholders’ hands but also for continued fellowship with them. The leaders of the Free Church, and members of its deputation to the United States, pointed to the greater potential for moral persuasion and reform to occur within the context of an ongoing relationship (e.g., Lewis Reference Lewis1968, 418–19); “Cordial criticism rather than sanctimonious denunciation” was supposed to offer the best prospects for ameliorating the lot of American slaves (Pettinger Reference Pettinger, Rice and Crawford1999, 47–48).Footnote 7 On this interpretation, the Send Back the Money campaign called not only for the pointless renunciation of funds that could be better spent in Scotland than America but also for severing relationships that could provide leverage for reform. Against such consequentialist considerations, is Douglass’s only argument the puritanical one that the Free Church had a moral obligation to keep its hands clean and avoid transacting with injustice? I will argue below that Douglass is specifically concerned with the political consequences of accepting, retaining, or returning the money rather than with the moral taint of money from or even fellowship with slaveholders.
A second kind of criticism (the consistency critique) charges Douglass with opportunism and even hypocrisy rather than puritanism. Like the puritanical critique, the consistency critique assumes that dirty money arguments must be grounded in claims about the conditions under which it is morally contaminating, and therefore unacceptable, to profit from or transact with injustice. The puritanical critique worries that such claims will be applied in ways that are excessively rigid or counterproductive; the consistency critique worries rather that dirty money claims are selectively applied and politically motivated. Douglass was arguably less concerned with the morality of the Free Church’s conduct than he was attuned to its propaganda value. His speeches frankly acknowledge this reason for his interest in the Free Church’s fundraising ethics: “We wish to have Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, Mexico, and even the red Indians with us, and against slavery. We want to have the whole country [the United States] surrounded with an antislavery wall, with the words legibly inscribed thereon, SEND BACK THE MONEY, SEND BACK THE MONEY” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979h, 243).
But as defenders of the Free Church were quick to point out, they were hardly the only people in Great Britain with financial ties to American slavery. Other institutions had accepted donations from slaveholders—including, apparently, an Edinburgh church that the Garrisonian campaigners used as a meeting location—and many more benefitted less directly from the proceeds of slave labor (Pettinger Reference Pettinger2018, 89).Footnote 8 Critics at the time seized on the apparent inconsistency with which the dirty money charge was deployed: why did the Garrisonian campaigners focus on this particular instance of guilt by philanthropic association? More generally, why fixate on the acceptance of tainted donations rather than slavery’s commercial importance and influence? Douglass recognized that tainted supply chains pervaded the Atlantic economy. He offered the following generalization at a London meeting in response to a heckler demanding “the value of a good slave”: “When cotton gets up in the market in England, the price of human flesh gets up in the United States … How much responsibility attaches to you in the use of that commodity” (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979j, 280; emphasis added). But he did not call for a boycott of American cotton or develop an epidemiology of responsibility in this context: compared with the Free Church case, there is nothing like the same call to purify oneself from unclean financial associations.Footnote 9 In light of this, Douglass’s attacks on the Free Church might seem unfair or unprincipled—an effort to shame some pillars of public morality for sins that he would let pass unremarked in other contexts. (Douglass’s speeches reflect both his awareness of this charge and his impatience with it: “We are guilty, say they, but these merchants are guilty, and some other parties are guilty also. I say, send back that money!” Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 181–82.) To critics, discrepancies in application undermine the moral force of dirty money arguments (or their standing as moral arguments at all).
A contemporaneous incident also raised the specter of inconsistency and invited the charge that Douglass lacked firm principles to distinguish between morally acceptable and unacceptable financial transactions. While he was abroad, some of his British friends entered into negotiations with Hugh Auld (Thomas’s brother, and by then Douglass’s legal owner), for the purchase of Douglass’s manumission papers. Douglass’s later autobiographies discuss the Send Back the Money campaign and the manumission transaction in the same chapter. Life and Times (1881/93) makes the connection between the two episodes more explicit by moving the manumission incident to the end of the chapter (after the discussion of the Scottish campaign, rather than before it, as in Bondage) and by using some new language to describe it: “To this commercial transaction, to this blood-money, I owe my immunity from the operation of the fugitive slave law” (Douglass [1881/93] Reference Douglass and Gates1994c, 669; emphasis added). Understanding how the two episodes could be considered to raise parallel moral problems requires recognizing that “the purchase of a slave’s freedom as property was an extraordinarily sensitive issue among some abolitionists, especially Garrisonians” (Blight Reference Blight2018, 172). Some thought it tantamount to acknowledging the legitimacy of property rights in human beings. Wright (Douglass’s ally on the Scottish tour) raised this concern to Douglass in a letter advising him to “disown the deed”: “That Certificate of your freedom, that Bill of Sale of your body and soul, from that villain, Auld, who dared to claim you as a chattel… . I wish you would not touch it. I cannot bear to think of you as being a party to such a transaction, even by silence” (Wright Reference Wright and McKivigan2009, 180).
If the Free Church was guilty of transactions that granted legitimacy to slavery (a charge Douglass makes and that I explore in more detail in the next section), can the same be said of one of Douglass’s own decisions? Douglass’s reply to Wright, defending the purchase of his manumission papers, emphasizes that the meaning of financial transactions depends on their political context and is shaped in part by the intentions and expressive choices of participants. He concedes that the transaction would violate antislavery principles “had those who purchased me done so with a view to compensate the slaveholder, for what he and they regarded as his rightful property,” but he denies that this was the intended or expressed significance of the actual transaction: “It was not to compensate the slaveholder, but to release me from his power; not to establish my natural right to freedom, but to release me from all legal liabilities to slavery. And all this, you and I, and the slaveholders, and all who know anything of the transaction, very well understand. The very letter to Hugh Auld, proposing terms of purchase, informed him that those who gave, denied his right to it” (Douglass Reference Douglass and McKivigan2009d, 186; emphasis in original). Some commentators have considered this last a “weak claim” and focused on Douglass’s incontrovertible pragmatic case for accepting the manumission papers (Blight Reference Blight2018, 172). Certainly, asking a person in Douglass’s position to refuse the measure of security being offered him might seem unreasonably demanding, and perhaps that is all that needed to be said. But Douglass himself does not make excuses along these lines, and we should not read his response to Wright as a mere throwaway: it suggests something important about his understanding of dirty money and the political stakes when transacting with injustice.
Douglass’s position on the Free Church is, in fact, consistent with the key claim in his letter to Wright: that moral responsibility does not inhere in the mere fact of financial transactions but in the political messages those transactions communicate and the ways they shape social and political relationships. Douglass claims that everyone, slaveholders included, understands the manumission transaction to be morally equivalent to a ransom payment, which (he argues) might be inexpedient but does not acknowledge the moral legitimacy of kidnapping. His argument involves contestable empirical claims (i.e., about how the manumission transaction was interpreted by various parties); it may also embed normative claims about whose interpretations of financial transactions are authoritative. This line of response to Wright in turn points to why the Free Church’s acceptance of gifts from slaveholders is different. A transaction that severs an unjust relationship with a slaveholder, which makes Douglass’s political status more secure, and where the abolitionist parties continue to insist on the illegitimacy of property rights in persons is different from gifts that sustain a relationship of legitimation between churches and slaveholders and that have the effect of disabling political criticism. This attention to political effects is characteristic of Douglass’s criticism of the Free Church in his Scottish speeches.
Sympathy, Imagination, and the Narration of Blood Money
Despite the absolutist strand in its rhetoric, the Send Back the Money campaign was pragmatic in its motivations: the activists hoped to use the controversy around the Free Church to shame American slaveholders and their allies and “to create a climate in which southern slavery was unacceptable to Scottish audiences” (Pettinger Reference Pettinger, Rice and Crawford1999, 44). Puritanical rhetoric about money often served mainly as a gateway to more general arguments about the need for Britons to renounce Christian union with slaveholders (Pettinger Reference Pettinger2018, 92). At a meeting in Glasgow on April 21, Wright begins by intoning injunctions to “Touch not the price of blood” (Wright Reference Wright1846c). But he then stakes out a rather different position on the conduct of the Free Church leaders: “I look not at the money but at the price paid for it: to get the money they gave the fellowship. Let them renounce the fellowship, and then go to the slave States and get all the money they can” (Wright Reference Wright1846c; emphasis added). It might therefore seem that the Free Church’s ill-gotten £3,000 is something of a MacGuffin: after all, Wright, Douglass, and other Garrisonians were quite prepared to criticize Christians who extended fellowship to slaveholders whether or not any money changed hands. It is of course true that Douglass, like the other campaigners, was not narrowly concerned with the ethics of religious or philanthropic fundraising, and so not all of his criticisms of the Free Church are specific to the receipt of dirty money. Nevertheless—and to a greater degree than the other campaigners—Douglass gives the money itself a central place in his analysis. Moreover, the way that he discusses the money and its significance is distinctive: he subverts the fetishization of blood money by bringing social and political relationships to the fore.
What concerns Douglass most are the political consequences of soliciting and accepting donations, not their intrinsic filthiness. He emphasizes two distinct but closely related kinds of effect.
To begin with, the Free Church’s fundraising had bad first-order political consequences because of what it communicated to people in Scotland and in America. The decision of a self-styled “Free” church to accept donations from slaveholders gave a specious “respectability” to those slaveholders and so to the slaveholding system (e.g., Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979e, 213; Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979g, 238). Taking the money not only elevated the political status of slaveholders; according to Douglass, it amounted to a denial of the moral and political status of enslaved people as insufficiently weighty to ground a refusal. What are we to think when Christians who “would not admit a sheep-stealer to their fellowship” (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979l, 350) accept the money and fellowship of man-stealers? In itself, the Free Church’s acceptance of this kind of criminal as a benefactor is politically pernicious: it unavoidably communicates a tolerance for the ongoing crimes of slavery.Footnote 10
But Douglass also consistently makes the claim that the evil first-order effects of the Free Church’s actions cannot be understood except with reference to the second-order effects that soliciting and receiving tainted donations had on the moral powers and political judgment of the church’s leaders.
The prospect of receiving money from slaveholders not only supplied a corrupt motive for fellowshipping them in the first place: it incentivized further deviations from appropriate forms of political engagement with either slaveholders or enslaved people. Speaking immediately after Wright in Glasgow, Douglass focuses on the distorting effect that soliciting donations had on the Free Church’s spiritual mission: in the United States, “they took care to preach such doctrines as would be palatable—as would be agreeably received—and as would bring them the slaveholders’ money” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979g, 231–32). Here Douglass directly rebuts the claim that continued engagement would help the Free Church contribute to the moral improvement of its American brethren. The relationship worked the other way: further corrupting the Free Church, rather than reforming the American ones.Footnote 11 The donations disabled the criticism that might otherwise have occurred within the framework of the ongoing relationship. Soliciting and accepting the money undercut both the church’s impulse to remonstrate with slaveholders and its ability to be taken seriously if it had (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979k, 337).Footnote 12
The problem goes deeper than is first apparent. On Douglass’s analysis, accepting the money did more than encourage strategic silence on the topic of slavery. It also had a powerful effect on where the church’s sympathies lay.Footnote 13 In a Dundee speech, Douglass’s most persistent charges against the Free Church emissaries concern their failure to sympathize with the enslaved people whom they saw firsthand (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 176–78). In Paisley the next month, Douglass makes even clearer his claim that the Free Church’s failures of sympathy are a predictable product of its philanthropic interests: “The man whose pockets are lined with the gold with which I ought to have been educated, stands up charging me with ignorance and poverty… . Macnaughtan has linked himself with the slaveholder, and he cannot therefore have any sympathy with a slave” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979h, 242; emphasis added). It is not only external criticism that has been made less likely or less credible. Accepting dirty money encourages recipients to offer rationalizations and apologies for the underlying crimes. Among other things, this creates a substantial risk that they will convince themselves with their own justifications. While Douglass’s early speeches on the Free Church present money as “the entire actuating motive of their hearts” (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 178), he later suggests a more nuanced and less transactional interpretation of their motivations: “I think they have worked themselves up to believe that it would be wrong for them to send it back, or at least that it would be humiliating” (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979i, 260).
Douglass makes particular rhetorical hay from a letter written by the Free Church founder Chalmers, which acknowledged that slavery was wrong but defended continued fellowship with American churches, arguing that a “Distinction ought to be made between the character of a system, and the character of the persons whom circumstances have implicated therewith” (Chalmers [1845] Reference Chalmers and Hanna1852, 568). In a series of speeches, Douglass wrings out Chalmers’ words and extracts their full measure of moral evasion:
“DISTINCTION ought to be made between the character of a system and the character of the person whom CIRCUMSTANCES have implicated therewith.” The Doctor would denounce slaveholding, robbery, and murder as sin, but would not denounce the slaveholder, robber, and murderer, as a sinner: he would make a DISTINCTION between sins and the persons whom CIRCUMSTANCES have implicated therewith. (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979b, 162; see also Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979d, 192–92 and Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979g, 236–37)
Chalmers’s “doctrine of circumstances,” Douglass charges, “does away with moral responsibility” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979b, 163). He gives a scathing send-up of “very feeling people” and their excuses for the slaveholder: “that he had been brought up a slaveholder—that his early habits were slaveholding” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979l, 350). Douglass does not deny that people are shaped by their circumstances.Footnote 14 The question is what kinds of attribution of moral responsibility to individuals make sense in light of the fact of environmental influences and the political determinants and effects of such attributions. Chalmers’s argument is undermined by its political context and effects—and by its sheer convenience. In it, we see the interplay between the first-order and second-order effects of accepting dirty money: the corruption of political judgment spurs further claims (e.g., that the slaveholder is a victim of circumstances) whose substance tends to legitimate slavery (i.e., by minimizing the personal wrong of slaveholding). As Douglass later puts it, tying the threads of his critique together, Chalmers and the other Free Church leaders “have stabbed the cause of abolition, and corrupted their own church,” for “they would never have put forth the defences, the apologies, and excuses, for the slave-holder, that we have witnessed, but that they took the blood-stained gold and were polluted by it … having done so, they feel they must make the best defence they can for the character of the slave-holder” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979k, 331).
This is not puritanism about intrinsically “filthy lucre” but realism about the ways that philanthropic relationships can change affected parties’ public standing, moral reasoning, and political judgment. Douglass’s concern is not a fetishistic one about distinguishing clean and dirty money but rather about money’s distorting effect on relationships: he is offering a political rather than merely ethical theory of dirty money. This helps to explain Douglass’s defense of paying “blood money,” in the manumission incident: because of its relational context and effects, that transaction did not (and was not likely to) produce anything like a similar disposition to defend the slaveholder. Perhaps even commercial transactions (e.g., cotton and sugar imports)—though capable of distorting incentives in slavery’s favor—are less likely to produce the “sympathy without justice—a sort of wrong-sided sympathy” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979l, 350) with which grateful churchmen regarded their American donors.
This diagnosis of the moral and political ramifications of accepting tainted donations informs Douglass’s response. Notably, Douglass refuses to state conditions under which accepting a controversial donation would be morally acceptable or to engage his opponents in casuistical reasoning: “Send back the money” is “the only answer which should be given to their sophistical arguments, and it is one which they cannot get over” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 181–82).Footnote 15 Part of his argument is that putative moral reasons for accepting donations can always be found, and will be found, at least when the donations are sizable. Rules about when to accept or refuse different kinds of money cannot substitute for, and may even subvert, appropriate forms of political judgment—especially if applied by white decision makers, insulated from accountability to or even consideration of the perspectives of enslaved people. What Nick Bromell (Reference Bromell2011, 699) calls Douglass’s “perspectivalism,” and his awareness that political judgments are mediated by and must incorporate a multiplicity of differently situated points of view, is evident here; in announcing, “I stand here as the representative of three millions of human beings in slavery” (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979p, 439), Douglass makes clear the missing perspective that he intends to supply on the Free Church controversy. His rhetorical strategies serve both to challenge and correct “wrong-sided sympathy” and to break the illusion that it is only money (now detached from slaveholders) that is at issue. He appeals to audiences’ feelings of compassion, anger, and shame in order to make vivid the relationships at stake in their decisions and to stir them up to better moral and political judgment.Footnote 16
Hence the importance of Douglass’s use of narrative in this context: it permits the dramatization of moral problems in ways that engage the audience’s imagination, sympathy, and judgment.Footnote 17 In a Dundee speech’s key set-piece, Douglass puts his own identity and personal history to creative use and anachronistically imagines himself back in slavery at the time of the Free Church’s mission to the United States. He stages an (invented) meeting between his “old master” Thomas Auld and George Lewis (a Free Church minister in Dundee, and one of its delegates to the United States):
Sir, I can almost imagine I see brother Lewis calling on the slaveholder. I can almost go down south, and see him, when I was a slave, calling on my old master, Mr. Thomas Auld… . When brother Lewis knocks at the door, I answer, and he asks, “Well, my lad, is your master in?” (Laughter.) “Yes, Sir.” Well, he walks into the house, sees my master, and introduces himself thus (for my ear would be at the keyhole immediately on the door being shut)—“My object in making this call this morning is to see if you would do something for the cause of religious freedom in Scotland.”… My master would reply, “Brother Lewis, I deeply sympathize with your efforts … I’ll tell you what I will do. I have a fine young negro who is to be sold, and I will sell him to-morrow and give you a contribution to the cause of freedom. (Applause and laughter.) If you will call, brother Lewis, and take your breakfast with me, I will then see what I can do; and as the slave is to be sold at Easton, I will feel happy if you also take a ride so far with me, as you may not have seen the capital of the county. Come about nine o’clock, brother, and I will see what I can do for the cause of freedom in Scotland.” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 179; see also Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979d, 193–94, for a reuse of the same set-piece)
The narrative continues, gaining momentum and pitch-black humor: the next morning, “brother Lewis” and “brother Auld” read together from the Bible (“‘Blessed are the poor in spirits—Blessed are they that give to the poor,’ and so on”), before breakfasting on “the bounties produced by the blood of the slave” and then departing for town with Douglass himself “tied behind the carriage and taken away” to be sold (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 179). As the speech reaches its climax, Douglass narrates his own sale for the cause of “freedom in Scotland:”
I am on the auction block, and the auctioneer is crying “Who bids for this comely stout young negro? He is accustomed to his work, and has an excellent trade on his hands.” Well, 500 dollars are bid. Oh, how brother Lewis’[s] eyes twinkle! (Laughter.) The auctioneer continues—“This is not half the value of the negro; he is not sold for any bad quality. His master has no desire to get rid of him, but only wants to get a little money to aid the cause of religious freedom in Scotland.” (Laughter.) Another flame of light from brother Lewis’[s] eyes. 600 dollars are bid. Once, twice, thrice, is said by the auctioneer, and I am sold for 600 dollars. (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 80)
After the auction, Lewis and Auld “go home to dinner” and “after prayer, brother Lewis, who has always an eye to the main chance, takes out the subscription list” to receive “the price of the bones and the blood of his fellow-man”—with “not a word … as to the sin of the auction” (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979c, 180).
Douglass had rehearsed some of these themes and rhetorical moves in earlier oratory. But while the denunciation of religious hypocrisy is equally biting here, something more is going on. The audience is encouraged to laugh at what passes for piety between Auld and Lewis. But the one-man show that Douglass performs in this part of the speech (assuming at different points the personas and voices of Auld, of Lewis, of the auctioneer) also invites the audience to imagine the human beings and actual relationships that generated the money in question. He does so in part to criticize the failure of sympathy of the Free Church and its delegates—even when the human cost of slavery stared them in the face. The repetition of “freedom” and its cognates underscores the absurdity of selling a human being to promote the cause of “freedom in Scotland.” His rhetoric calls attention to the corruption of moral judgment that must have taken place for participants in the scene not to register or comment on the sin of the slave auction.
At the same time, Douglass is stimulating the sympathetic imagination of his present audience—and not only for the purpose of shaming Auld and Lewis.Footnote 18 Rather, there is a constructive dimension to Douglass’s aims and rhetoric here: in part because of the ways that judgments have been corrupted, he needs to create in his audience the sense of moral taint that he presents himself as describing. Images of blood are constituted by human sympathy and imagination; even places where Douglass might seem to be presenting a simpler and more straightforward argument about moral taint and the conditions of complicity prove on inspection to accord a greater role to the power of human imagination and agency in imposing meanings on money. In Paisley on April 25, referring to a town previously visited by the campaigners, Douglass introduces a new image of indelible moral taint:
In Arbroath there was painted in blood red capitals, SEND BACK THE MONEY. A woman was sent to wash it, but the letters still remained visible, SEND BACK THE MONEY. (Great applause.) A mason was afterwards got to chisel it out, but there still was left in indelible characters, SEND BACK THE MONEY. (Cheers.) I want men, women, and children to send forth this cry wherever they go. Let it be the talk around the fireside, in the street, and at the market-place—indeed, everywhere. (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979h, 242–43)
The image is one of a moral stain that cannot be nullified by human action. But, equally importantly, that stain was itself constructed through human action: it “was painted” by somebody, and the audience is called upon to “send forth” the cry and reiterate the message.
The same episode had previously been described in a letter by Wright to Garrison, written in Abroath on February 11 and published in The Liberator on April 3:
The Saturday night after I left, somebody prepared some black and some red paint, and at the midnight hour, painted with black paint, on the Free Churches, in a prominent place near the door, and in very large letters, the following sentence—‘THE SLAVE’S BLOOD;’ and then, with a brush, dashed the blood red paint about on the stones… . Sabbath morn, when the people came to church, there were the sentence and the blood-red spots; and they carried shame, conviction and wrath to the Frees… . They could not wash, nor scrape off the bloody spots, nor the black letters. It seemed like the blood of the murdered victim, that could not be washed out! A man was employed by the elders of one of the marked churches to put up a scaffold, and to chisel out the convincing words. But, on the other church, the words and bloody spots are still seen. (Wright Reference Wright1846b; last emphasis in italics added)
Douglass would surely have seen Wright’s account and may be drawing on it in his Paisley address.Footnote 19 But Wright’s version, with its invocation of “bloody spots” and “the blood of the murdered victim, that could not be washed out,” makes the allusion to Macbeth more explicit. Wright, by his own admission, had the Scottish play on his mind in the winter of 1845–46: in an earlier letter to Garrison from Dunsinane, on December 26, 1845, he writes, “Macbeth Castle, Dunsinane, Lady Macbeth, Duncan that hath ‘murdered sleep,’ the air dagger, the witches, and all the scenes and characters of that tragedy, are before me and around me” (Wright Reference Wright1846a).Footnote 20
Whether or not Douglass shared Wright’s fascination with the play, or his conscious association between the protagonists’ blood-stained hands and the taint of “blood money,” the allusion is an apt one. In Macbeth, too, it is people’s shifting perceptions of blood stains that drive the drama. There is, by Act V, no blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands; there is only a guilty imagination that took some time to wake.
Conclusion
The Free Church never did send back the money, and Douglass later admitted that from this point of view the campaign was a failure: “The free Church held on to the blood-stained money, and continued to justify itself in its position—and of course to apologize for slavery—and does so till this day” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass and Gates1994b, 384). Nevertheless, he stresses, “One good result followed the conduct of the Free Church: it furnished an occasion for making the people of Scotland thoroughly acquainted with the character of slavery, and for arraying against the system the moral and religious sentiment of that country” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass and Gates1994b, 385). The reading offered here helps us understand Douglass’s mixed overall verdict on the Send Back the Money campaign and his claim that it was “amply justified” despite its failure to “procure the sending back of the money” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass and Gates1994b, 384). While the campaign failed to extract the desired forms of political engagement from the Free Church itself, it helped to send a countervailing message “that the majority are with the oppressed and against the oppressor” (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979h, 243). In Douglass’s speeches, blood money also became a powerful tool for rehumanizing the issue of slavery and for instilling a wider sense of moral responsibility for combatting it.
Douglass’s dirty money oratory also helps us to shift perspective on contemporary debates. Some institutional responses to dirty money controversies have emphasized the need for clearer rules about disqualified donors. (See, e.g., the report commissioned by MIT to review the university’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein; Braceras, Chunias, and Martin Reference Braceras, Chunias and Martin2020, 63.) But such rules risk being fetishistic (distinguishing clean from dirty money, i.e., in terms of its provenance) or reductive (distinguishing morally pure from tainted donors). Douglass is oriented instead to the effects of donations on the political status of affected parties and on the political judgment of recipient institutions and the broader community. He gives a different diagnosis of what can go wrong in philanthropic fundraising: not (or not just) that an institution accepts the “wrong kind” of money, or money from the wrong kind of person, but that its actions undermine appropriate forms of political engagement in ways that the institution’s representatives are then strongly motivated to justify. Douglass counsels distrust of the impulse to rationalize under the shadow of past or prospective gifts, which can have a soporific effect on moral reasoning and political judgment.
Applying Douglass’s arguments to contemporary dilemmas does not return straightforward answers to important questions that receiving institutions might have: what about money that represents the proceeds of injustices less extreme or less systemic than slavery? What about money that comes from the estates of deceased wrongdoers or from their heirs? Are gifts from reformed wrongdoers acceptable or even to be encouraged? These are the kind of rules that a puritan needs and that the consistency critic tries to use in reductios. But Douglass conspicuously avoids the articulation of general rules for identifying and responding to tainted money.Footnote 21 While pointing to political variables, he also stresses the need for judgment and moral reflection, both introspective (attending to one’s own susceptibility to motivated reasoning and corrupted judgment) and extrospective (attending to the perspectives of other people).Footnote 22
People on all sides of dirty money debates are frequently—if only implicitly—working with a puritanical model (that may owe something to a vulgar Garrisonianism): seeking to specify the conditions necessary for an individual or group agent to count as having consistently avoided complicity with injustice. Consider the complaint of Jillian Sackler, the widow of Arthur M. Sackler, who died in 1987, before OxyContin’s arrival on the market: “Arthur had nothing to do with OxyContin… . He did not profit from OxyContin, and none of his philanthropic gifts were in any way connected to opioids or to deceptive medical marketing—which he likewise had nothing to do with. It deeply saddens me to witness Arthur being blamed for actions taken by his brothers and other OxySacklers” (Bishara Reference Bishara2019). From this perspective, protests seeking the removal of Arthur Sackler’s name from university buildings (successful in the case of Tufts University’s school of medicine and thus far unsuccessful at Harvard University’s art museums) are unfairly targeting the memory of an innocent man. (Against this, activists claim that Arthur Sackler bears responsibility for pioneering the advertising techniques that later contributed to the opioid epidemic.) This frames the debate around money’s provenance and the appropriateness of backward-looking ascriptions of blame.
By contrast, Douglass’s focus is on the ways that accepting or refusing money can contribute or deny legitimacy to unjust outcomes, promote or subvert just political relationships, and shape moral and political judgments. He uses criticism of dirty money to direct attention to ongoing injustices, and he uses attributions of responsibility to individuals in ways that support rather than distract from attacks on the systemic character of injustice. Goldin and other activists attempt something similar when they link their efforts to shame the Sacklers to calls for changes in the ways that governments and citizens engage with the opioid crisis. Or consider the decision by RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services), a Texas-based legal aid nonprofit, to reject a $250,000 donation from the Silicon Valley software company Salesforce. RAICES cited Salesforce’s contracting with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP): in an open letter to Salesforce, its director wrote that “Pledging us a small portion of the money you make from CPB [sic] contracts will not distract us from your continuing support for this agency. We will not be a beneficiary of your effort to buy your way out of ethical responsibility.”Footnote 23 To ask whether RAICES was consistently checking the provenance of all other donations it received, or whether the money offered by Salesforce came specifically from its CBP contracts, would be to miss the point by converting a political decision into a question of applied ethics. Publicly refusing the donation was an opportunity to challenge the respectability of prevailing forms of commercial and political activity and to make a wider attribution of political responsibility for injustice.
This also provides a different understanding of the point of protesting an institution’s acceptance of dirty money. On Douglass’s model, protest is not aimed primarily at holding individuals or institutions responsible for their past moral failures.Footnote 24 Dirty money skeptics are often interpreting claims about dirty money through this lens when they criticize activists as impossibly rigid and puritanical or as unfair, inconsistent, and hypocritical. But protest, for Douglass, is a creative and meaning-making activity, not just a backward-looking ascription of responsibility. In contexts where injustice is respectable or routine, the red paint on church stones—or the “die-ins” and scattered pill bottles at Sackler-funded institutions—exert a counter-pressure in the direction of moral reflection and political engagement. Moreover, the decision by a church, museum, or other nonprofit to reject or return dirty money is not only an ethical response that aims to avoid personal moral complicity. Refusing or returning money can be part of the very political project that protesters are engaged in.
Douglass calls his audiences’ attention to the fact that “a time was coming” when communion with slavery would be considered a moral stain; he warns that they will “look back with shame and confusion” on their actions (Douglass Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979f, 230). In doing so, he acknowledges that what counts as dirty money will change, under the pressure of meaning-making projects like his. Our overall judgments of such projects will depend not only on the substance of protesters’ meaning-making activities but also on the degree to which other people are enabled—and allowed—to learn and change. It seems important, then, that in his Scottish speeches (Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979a, 147) Douglass quotes not only Isaiah’s rebukes, but also his invitation to repent, to reform, and (perhaps only then) to “reason together”:
16 Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
17 Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Matthew Landauer, Eric MacGilvray, Inés Valdez, Frederick Wilmot-Smith, Henry Wu, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous comments on drafts of this article. I would also like to thank participants in the Ohio State University Political Theory Workshop for reading and discussing an earlier version of the paper and the members of the Ohio State University Undergraduate Philosophy Club for a stimulating conversation about some of these ideas.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
ETHICAL STANDARDS
The author affirms this research did not involve human subjects.
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