Virginia’s Slavery Deliberations

1. Slavery Debate, 1831-1832 Virginia House of Delegates

By the time Nat Turner was hanged on November 11, 1831, his August insurrection had been suppressed, about 50 African Americans had been quickly tried and executed, and many more had been banished from Virginia or simply lynched. For 3 months, the Commonwealth had also been inundated with newspaper articles, memorials, and citizen petitions, the net effect of which was to prompt Governor John Floyd to recommend to the new session of the state legislature that it consider a “revision of all the laws, intended to preserve in due subordination the slave population of our state.” ¹ In response, the House of Delegates appointed a select committee to examine the issue and to report back to the House for a full discussion. Debate started ahead of schedule, however. One of the petitions the House received came from the Virginia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in Charles City County, which called for the abolition of slavery and the “restoration of the African race to the inalienable rights of man” (Root 2010, 125). When William O. Goode of Mecklenberg County proposed that the delegates agree to disregard the Quakers’ petition and “all petitions, memorials and resolutions, which have for their object the manumission of persons held in servitude under the existing laws of this commonwealth” (Root 2010, 25), Thomas Jefferson Randolph used the opportunity to present his emancipation plan: the children of female slaves born after July 4, 1840 would be transferred to the state at age 18 for women and 21 for men. As public property, they would then be hired out until they earned enough to defray the cost of sending them to Africa. What followed was the full House of Delegates’ debate on slavery with Moore speaking first.

The initial and longer part of Moore’s speech considered the evils and dangers of slavery for the white population. Some of these followed from the necessity of denying slaves an education. Because knowledge nurtures the inborn desire for freedom, slave ignorance had to be “as profound as possible” (Root 2010, 29). At the same time, a lack of knowledge produces a lack of moral feeling. Accordingly, Moore claimed slaves were “incapable of deciding between right and wrong, of judging of the enormity of crime, or of estimating the high satisfaction which the performance of an honorable act affords to more intelligent beings” (Root 2010). Fears of “infamy or disgrace” did not restrain their “impulses of passion.” To the contrary, because their “beclouded reason” led them to expect payment for their labor, they felt entitled to rob and injure white property. Add to these wrongs “the indiscriminate intercourse of the sexes among our slave population,” and the result raised an obvious question for Moore. Could it be expected “that where so large a mass of the population . . . is corrupt . . . the other classes can entirely escape the contagion” (Root 2010, 30)?

After insisting that they could not, Moore noted two additional evils of slavery: its effect on prosperity and its effect on white population growth. Slavery decreases prosperity, Moore argued. Because agricultural work was associated with slave labor, free white Virginians refused to engage in it. Thus, whereas in the North, farmers cultivated their own land, in Virginia, it lay idle unless slaves cultivated it and, because it was not their land, they cultivated it in what Moore called “a careless manner.” The consequence, he said, was that the non-slave-holding states were replete with “highly cultivated farms, thriving villages and an industrious white population” (Root 2010, 31) while in Virginia, “the whole face of the country wears an appearance of almost utter desolation, distressing to the beholder” (Root 2010, 30). According to Moore, this desolation also hampered the growth of the white population. Given the presence of slaves whose subsistence was guaranteed by their masters, white Virginians had too few opportunities in Virginia and had either to emigrate or die. Nor could Virginians easily sell their slaves out of state because other states were experiencing the same problems and banning new imports. “The inevitable consequence,” Moore said, “will be that the blacks will continue to increase without any check whatever” (Root 2010, 35), and he produced charts to prove his point. While the white population of Eastern Virginia grew by 61,352 people between 1790 and 1830, the African American population grew by 167,588. At present rates, Moore continued, there would be 272,983 more African Americans than white people in Virginia in 1870, a proportion that he suggested would not be conducive to white safety.

A final evil of slavery for white people for Moore was its effect on the capacity of the state to defend itself against foreign aggression. The more slaves a county possessed, the more white men it would have to employ to keep them in subjection and the fewer, then, the county would have to deploy against a foreign enemy. Moore denied that he was exaggerating the problem, for slaves

are intimately acquainted with all the secret passes, strong holds, and fastnesses of the country, and being restrained by no moral or patriotic considerations, will ever be ready to act as guides to an invading foe, and to flock to his standard whenever he may be disposed to tempt them to it, by holding out the strongest temptation which can ever be presented to the human mind—namely, the possession of liberty. (Root 2010, 31)

In the second and briefer part of his speech, Moore turned to the evils of slavery for those enslaved. He did not deny its injustice. He maintained that in Virginia it “exists in a milder form than it has done in any other portion of the world” (Root 2010, 35). Nevertheless, he maintained that it violated the Constitution’s Bill of Rights and argued that

although the circumstances may exist which put it out of the power of the owners to grant the slaves liberty . . . the right to the enjoyment of liberty is one of those perfect, inherent and inalienable rights, which pertain to the whole human race.

Indeed, he continued,

Even if slavery was not injurious to ourselves, and the condition of the slave was ten times as happy as it is, it is enough for us to know that we have no right to hold them against their consent.

Enough for what? Moore’s answer was without hesitation—“to induce us to make a vigorous effort to send them from among us” (Root 2010, 36). He, therefore, concluded his address by urging the House to adopt “any practicable plan for the removal of the slaves” whether

the scheme of emancipation, presented . . . by the gentleman from Berkeley (Mr. [Charles J.] Faulkner) or the scheme . . . by the gentleman from Albemarle (Mr. [Thomas Jefferson] Randolph) or some other scheme by which it may be provided, that all slaves after a certain period, shall, if not emancipated or removed before they attain a certain age, be seized and sold by the officers of the Commonwealth at public auction, to be carried out of the State, and the proceeds paid over to the former owner. (Root 2010, 36)

Moore dwelled less on the threat of another insurrection than Philip A. Bolling whose speech immediately followed his and raised the prospect of a delegate’s returning home from the legislative session only to find the “mangled corpses of his butchered family” (Root 2010, 38). Yet, in his response, Gholson poo-pooed the prospect of violence, sarcastically insisting that if Bolling’s fears were plausible, it would surely be “unmanly” for the delegates to be in Richmond at all, leaving behind “unprotected and undefended, the dearest objects of our affection—the wives of our bosom and the children they have borne us” (Root 2010, 46). Gholson represented Brunswick County where 60% of the residents were enslaved. These slaves posed no threat, he insisted; indeed, in comparison with the working classes of Europe and the Northern states, “the slaves of Virginia are as happy a laboring lot as exists upon the habitable globe” (Root 2010, 49). And what about ideas for a gradual emancipation of the slaves? Faulkner’s scheme was less completely worked out than Randolph’s and tried to preserve all the rights of property. Gholson, therefore, took specific aim at Randolph’s proposal. In the first place, Gholson said, the plan would incur the resentment of those born before the date of July 4, 1840, after which some slaves would become eligible for removal to Africa while others remained enslaved. By infuriating those left behind, the plan would in fact increase the threat of insurrection. Second, the proposal was self-contradictory, as it would give “color and sanction to the forcible acquisition of that today which we proclaim we ought in justice to yield tomorrow” (Root 2010, 53).

Most importantly in Gholson’s view, proposals for emancipating the slaves violated both Constitutional and natural principles of justice with regard to the rights of ownership. The proposals violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to property but, worse, in violating this right, it violated a “sacred principle . . . deep laid in the principles of justice,” without which “there is no civilization—no government.” Gholson continued, “So essentially does the very existence of society depend on it, that the horrors of war, pestilence and famine, silence its demands only for a season” (Root 2010, 40). As for Moore’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights, Gholson argued that insofar as the founders had themselves held slaves, Moore had clearly misunderstood it. According to Gholson, the section on which Moore focused pertained to human beings only in a state of nature and was not “a declaration of the powers of this government, or of the social obligations or rights of society.” Moreover, Gholson continued, because contemporary Virginians had inherited slavery rather than creating it, and because they could not relieve themselves of it even if they tried, they ought not even debate the “abstract question of slavery or its morality or its immorality” (Root 2010, 49). Instead, Gholson said, the House ought to pursue a far more practicable and important plan to which he thought all could agree, namely, “removing the free colored population” (Root 2010, 48).

The debate in the House of Delegates continued for 2 weeks, framed for the most part by the terms Moore and Gholson established. Delegates considered the problem of unimpeded growth on the part of the slave population and pointed to the growth of the free black population as well. William M. Rives asked whether the delegates could “fold our arms in fatal security” while they watched the “black cloud rising and swelling” (Root 2010, 60). Other delegates offered their own calculations of the increasing disproportion between the white and black populations of Virginia and the threat it posed. Many speakers on both sides of the issue testified to the contentment and favorable working conditions of Virginia’s enslaved population, while also demeaning them as degraded and debased and referring to free African Americans as “idle, vicious and worthless” (Root 2010, 57). Echoing the worries of the risk they posed, George W. Summers remarked on “the enemy within,” who “add nothing to the . . . strength of the country.” (Root 2010, 153)

A great deal of the House debate focused on the expense and practicality of compensating slave owners while still reserving sufficient funds to send the former slaves out of Virginia. Although those in favor of gradual emancipation tried to argue that both could be accomplished relatively economically, those against abolition claimed no scheme was affordable. Calling himself a moderate, William H. Brodnax, who had commanded the militiamen from Brunswick and Greensville counties helping to suppress Turner’s insurrection and who now chaired the House of Delegates’ special committee on slavery, offered a compromise that he said was based on careful economic calculations: deport 6,000 slaves and free black people each year, and for $200,000 per annum in 80 years, Virginia could be entirely free of African Americans.

Another issue under debate was Virginian prosperity. Those defending slavery extolled the state’s riches and disputed Moore’s picture of statewide desolation while those for abolition claimed Virginia was losing ground to other states. Robert D. Powell looked to the white population it might have had without slavery: “a population of free and independent yeomanry, interested in the welfare of their native land, devoting their best energies, mental and physical, to the advancement of their country’s honor and glory” (Root 2010, 93). Others decried the way slaves were being trained in trades such as blacksmithing in order to help their masters make ends meet but thereby depriving deserving whites of employment.

Of greatest concern, however, was the right of property. Much of the discussion debated whether ownership of slaves was a right under the Constitution or simply a benefit conferred to slave owners under Virginia statute. William B. Preston took the latter view and declared that “when the public necessity demanding their emancipation is greater than the public necessity for their retention as slaves, that then it is in the power of this or any subsequent Legislature to repeal this statute” (Root 2010, 138). The public necessity he cited here was white self-preservation. In contrast, those defending slavery declared themselves aghast at the idea that their rights of property in slaves was not Constitutionally fundamental and even more aghast that these rights might not, if Randolph’s plan were to be adopted, extend to those children of their female slaves born after July 4, 1840. In their view, it made no sense to say that one owns the slave but not the children she bears. As Gholson remarked, again sarcastically, about the residents of his county,

It has always (perhaps seriously) been considered by that steady and old-fashioned people, that the owner of land had a reasonable right to its annual profits; the owner of orchards, to their annual fruits; the owner of brood mares, to their product; and the owner of female slaves, to their increase. (Root 2010, 45)

The right of property, defenders of slavery insisted, was inviolable; moreover to question whether slaves were property was to question every constitution ever written. Indeed, William Daniel Jr. went so far as to declare,

You may prove, if you can, that slavery is immoral, unjust, and unnatural, that it originated in avarice and cruelty, that it is an evil and a curse, and you still do not convince me that our slaves are not property and as such, protected by our Constitution. (Root 2010, 97)

In the end, the House of Delegates arrived at a two-part resolution. It expressed its awareness of “the great evils” arising from slavery as well as of the need to remove from the Commonwealth both free black Virginians and those who might become free in the future. Yet the resolution also said that action would be difficult and that it should “await a more definite development of public opinion” (Root 2010, 167). Ultimately, the legislative session as a whole enacted only two laws. One provided funds to remove free African Americans from Northampton County on the Eastern Shore. The other prohibited slaves and free African Americans from preaching, restricted the publication and circulation of antislavery literature, transferred criminal trials for free African Americans to special courts, and prohibited them from owning guns or slaves. Alfred L. Brophy writes, “What had begun as a discussion of emancipation ended with the shackles fastened harder on the slaves” (Brophy 2016, 32).

It is difficult to see this discussion as a discussion of emancipation, however, since the delegates could not distinguish between emancipation and removal and were equally or more intent on ridding Virginia of free blacks than they were on solving what they saw as their slavery problem. Of the two proposals for abolition and re-colonization, Randolph understood it as a given that former slaves would have to finance their own ouster, while Faulkner declared that although he was “in favor of some scheme of manumission that will ultimately relieve my country from the catastrophe which threatens it,” he was “for no plan, which is not mild—gradual—prospective, in its operation” and for “no scheme that does not respect the right of property.” ² Although Daniel referred to arguments for the immorality, injustice, and unnaturalness of enslaving human beings, such arguments actually arose only intermittently during the debate and were never considered entirely persuasive. Even those delegates who conceded slavery’s immorality, injustice, and unnaturalness also conceded the necessity of continuing it for a time. More often delegates dismissed such arguments as gestures toward abstract human rights that in the face of both property rights and the established, socially accepted and benign status of Virginian slavery were simply irrelevant. In his speech on the eighth day of the debate, John E. Shell from Brunswick County even regretted the way the petition from the Society of Friends had been handled. Because the Quakers had always held slavery to be immoral, their petition reflected no new development in public opinion. Shell, therefore, thought it a pity that Goode should ever have acknowledged it and/or by doing so precipitated the debate. ³

Given the bizarre nature of the debate, the question arises as to what could have brought the participants to their senses. If the petition from the Society of Friends did not move the delegates to prioritize the “rights of man” over the rights of property in human beings, what could have? How, in general, is it possible to reorient a debate the terms of which on both sides are distorted by prejudice, bigotry, and self-interest? I turn next to aspects of Bohman’s work, which defends the epistemic possibilities of public deliberation.

2. Public Deliberation

Like others in the deliberative tradition, Bohman sees public deliberation as the basis of legitimate political decision making. Because laws and policies reflect the coercive power of the state, they are democratically legitimate only insofar as they are produced in the process of public discussion and debate where citizens or their representatives test their interests and reasons in a public forum. In public deliberation, citizens and their representatives deliberate before an audience of equal citizens and do so through overlapping spheres of discussion and decision making. For theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Joshua Cohen, such public deliberation complies with a procedural ideal, one embodying norms of freedom, equality, and publicity where publicity refers to the employment of reasons that all those affected could accept. Habermas (Habermas 1996, 110) thus looks to discourses in which participants attempt to reach agreement solely on the basis of the better argument while Cohen claims that “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997, 73).

Bohman supplements such procedural accounts in two ways. First, he adds to the legitimating function of public deliberation its epistemic import. In his view, the importance of public deliberation lies in the way it improves political justification and democratic decision making by opening debate up to a broad range of relevant perspectives and alternative views. One need not conceive of this improvement as reflecting an approximation to a correct decision. Rather, Bohman is interested in the quality of reasons: where public, they are “less likely to exclude legitimate interests, relevant knowledge, or appropriate dissenting opinions” (Bohman 1996, 27). Second, Bohman thinks procedural accounts “idealize too much” (Bohman 1996, 29) and thereby fail to provide direction for actual political practice in modern complex and pluralistic democracies. Because deliberation takes place in political settings without the idealized conditions to which Habermas and Cohen appeal, Bohman replaces procedural accounts with an analysis that emphasizes the give and take of dialogue. Here deliberation is “a dialogical process of exchanging reasons for the purpose of resolving problematic situations that cannot be settled without interpersonal coordination and cooperation.” Participants are accountable to one another through the exchange of reasons in a “joint, cooperative activity” (Bohman 1996, 27).

Crucial here is the ability of speakers to secure what, following J. L. Austin, Bohman calls uptake. Participants do not simply hold forth in monological orations but rather explicitly respond to the concerns and opinions of others. Moreover, they can expect that their own contributions play some role in the final decision. Deliberation need not end in consensus. Rather the reasons participants offer must only be sufficiently convincing to others that they can continue their cooperation even if ultimately they do not agree with the final decision. In considering how reasons can become sufficiently convincing, Bohman looks to deliberations that satisfy certain conditions: those of non-tyranny, equality, and publicity. If it is not to be tyrannous, the dialogical process must preclude power asymmetries that allow some to exert monopolistic control over the outcome. If it is to reflect equality, the process must ensure the inclusion of all citizens while excluding political forms of influence such as power, wealth, and pre-existing social inequalities. Finally, deliberations must embody publicity on three levels: The reasons participants offer must be formulated in such a way that all deliberators can understand and potentially accept them; the reasons must be directed at an unrestricted and inclusive audience, and there must be no restrictions in communication between audience and speakers.

Clearly, the debate in the House of Delegates failed to meet these conditions. The debate may have reflected the equality of Virginia’s citizens but discounted most of its residents, and the reasons offered were directed not at an unrestricted and inclusive audience but at an audience that excluded both free black Virginians and the enslaved population. Moreover, this exclusion was profound. To be sure, many voices in the debate failed to secure uptake, including those reflected in the petition by the Society of Friends. Although some delegates referred to the Quaker’s petition, they generally did so to dismiss it. In general, they deemed the rights of man that the Quakers cited overly abstract in relation to the irrevocable rights of property in slaves and the practical issues of compensating slave owners while paying to remove slaves from the state. It is thus hard to see how the Quakers could have understood themselves as full and equal participants whose views received due consideration and played some role in the final proposals the legislature passed. The exclusion of African American Virginians was of a different order, however. Not only were their voices ignored and suppressed, their right even to have a voice remained outside the comprehension of the delegates.

Indeed, in the House of Delegates debates, publicity appears less as an acknowledged gain for the quality of democratic decision making than as a problem. Many delegates thought abolition discussions would only encourage free black Virginians to incite slaves to rebel. As for the slaves themselves, unlike Moore and many other delegates, Goode did not consider them ignorant. “On the contrary,” he said, “They are an active and intelligent class watching and weighing every movement of the Legislature with perfect knowledge of its bearing and effect” (Root 2010, 26). Just these attributes were reasons, however, not to value African American opinions and possible contributions to the debate but rather to silence debate and avoid deliberating about slavery at all. Goode maintained that discussing its abolition would not only decrease the property value of slaves but also inspire in them the hope that with another insurrection they might gain their freedom. Daniel proclaimed slavery a subject that simply could not bear public examination:

On all other questions, speeches are made and essays are printed for the purpose of informing and enlightening those who are to act upon them. But, in the present case, the same speeches and essays are enlightening not only to those who are to act upon them, but also those who are to be acted upon. These ignorant and degraded wretches are not so entirely destitute of the means of information as not to learn the character of the public proceeds, which are had respecting them . . . Submit this question to the people, and you open the door for a discussion that cannot be otherwise than dangerous . . . Sir, we have already gone farther than prudence dictated. We have already struck a chord, which may vibrate with most fearful discord throughout this Commonwealth for some time to come. We much fear that the historian of after days will record the commencement of this discussion as a sad day in the annals of the Republic. (Root 2010, 98)

The value of publicity is thus precisely the value that Goode deplores and Daniel actively disputes. Public debate and deliberation may be appropriate for white Virginians insofar as they are agents and are to act upon the results of debate and deliberation. Slaves, however, have no agency and are only to be acted upon. Not only is publicity inappropriate with regard to them; it is to be avoided precisely because it might spur them to move from those acted upon to those acting. Nevertheless, suppose the legislature had recognized the voices of slaves and free black Virginians and suppose they had been part of the audience to which public reasons were addressed. The prospect of slaves taking up the arguments of the various members of the House of Delegates is surreal. Were they meant to argue for or against the prospect of their murdering slave-owning families, for example, to deny or confirm their contamination of the white population or to defend themselves against the charge of carelessness in agriculture? Similar questions arise for free black Virginians. To dispute the characterizations the legislators gave them would have given those characterizations more credit than they deserved. The inclusion of the enslaved and free black populations into the debate as framed would not have served to improve the epistemic quality of the reasons offered in it; rather it would more likely have brought the debate to an end. Ironically, Goode and Daniel may have been correct: there are not only individual reasons but also entire discussions that may not be able to survive the glare of publicity.

Bohman addresses the circumstances of failed political debate in exploring the relation between informal public discussion and institutionalized debate. A deliberative model of democracy runs along two tracks, joining debate in formal organizations and institutions to open and general discussion in the public sphere. The former focuses on solving problems and efficient decision making while the latter provides the arena in which debates can remain open, new issues can be raised, and old decisions reconsidered. In modern societies, this arena spreads across a variety of different spaces: voluntary associations, workspaces, public media, and the like. Democracies might be said to be deliberative to the extent that they allow for porous pathways between the two tracks so that public opinion can make its way into and influence more formal debate. African American media was in its fledgling and underfinanced beginnings in the North in 1832 and non-existent in Virginia but extensive public discussion among whites took place in Virginian newspapers not only before but also during the 1831-1832 debate. Delegates’ speeches were either summarized or printed verbatim in the newspapers and received extensive commentary in editorials and letters. Yet in this instance, with a few exceptions, the white public sphere was as biased and blinkered as the House of Delegates. Petitions to the press insisted on the removal of the free black inhabitants of Virginia from the Commonwealth and discussed the question of emancipation only in linking it inextricably to deportation and colonization. Other topics focused on the way the issue of slavery might ignite a sectional war between eastern Virginia, with many slaves, and western Virginia, with fewer, and on the possibility of a civil war with the North. For their part, Northern opinions remained unsolicited although Brodnax referred to “miscreants . . . who have endeavored, by incendiary publications, to excite our slaves to insurrection” (Root 2010, 74) and Gholson attributed Moore’s views to “Northern lights . . . that must be extinguished” (Root 2010, 47). If deliberation in the public sphere can influence more formal debate, what is to be done when a public is itself exclusionary and fails to deliberate well?

Bohman turns to the role of social critics whose role, he says, is

to overcome blockages of and restrictions on communication, to let citizens see things in new ways, to help in the formation of new publics, and thus to overcome the restricted forms of institutionalization and routinization typical of the state in its current form. (Bohman 1996, 203)

In considering how social critics can accomplish this task, Bohman makes a number of observations. First, critics do more than simply enter into debate on the usual terms, hoping to develop reasons that can be sufficiently convincing to secure uptake. As in more formal and institutionalized debate, the blockages and restrictions on communication already guarantee that relevant reasons, reasons such as those the Society of Friends presented will not secure uptake. Consequently, critics may need to use indirect and strategic forms of communication such as irony, jokes, metaphors, and narrative that do not try as much to persuade as to reorient deliberative frames. Social critics may also aim at new audiences, new emerging publics who insist upon their needs and interests and who may already engage in new forms of interaction. Here, Bohman follows John Dewey. Democratic states are responsive to the needs of the publics that create them; hence, groups with interests these publics exclude need to form new publics and with the help of social critics work to make the state responsive to them. Finally, Bohman argues that in order to be most effective, social critics need to enmesh their arguments and analyses in “larger sequences of politically structured talk and discussion” that “create a forum in which reciprocal critical dialogue can emerge” (Bohman 1996, 206). As an example, he points to the Civil Rights Movement. The various issues surrounding segregation that it brought to public awareness moved from this larger public sphere to the formal institutional discussions in Congress and led finally to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. “Critical discourse reconstituted state institutions, which now could be informed by a new, multiracial public. It altered voting procedures and made them more inclusive, created special bodies for the enforcement of civil rights legislation and so on” (Bohman 1996, 207).

Yet arguably more important than critical discourse to facilitating the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act were a series of violent events, including two in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. In May, Bull Conor’s policemen trained high-powered hoses and dogs on peaceful protestors and were seen on television throughout the country by viewers many of whom had been previously clueless about the brutal oppression of African Americans in the South. In September, four young African American girls were killed when the Ku Klux Klan detonated a bomb in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Whether these events elicited grief, shame, or merely embarrassment, these reactions were arguably as or more significant in changing public opinions and the framework of public debate as critical discourse and new forms of communication. The same might be said for the massacre of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015. It is not clear that arguments would ever have convinced the governor of South Carolina to lower the Confederate flag in front of the statehouse. After a week of attending funerals, she said it should never have been there in the first place.

The change in government actions and public opinion in these cases suggests the importance of negative experiences in altering entrenched understandings. We operate under a set of established practices and engrained assumptions about how the world is, what our society is like, who we are, and what we are capable of doing. In going through certain experiences, we are “pulled up short” in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1989, 268) words. What we took to be the case we now understand not to be the case. Moreover, assumptions we did not know we possessed are now revealed to us precisely as the ungrounded assumptions that we once held. For many of us, pictures of the Confederate flag, ubiquitous statues of Confederate generals and large memorials to the Confederate dead may once have been simply part of our landscape, quaint features of a long-past war. The murder of American citizens at prayer shocked us, however, and in doing so transformed our understanding of the meaning of those features. They were no longer innocuous reminders of a by-gone way of life but were disclosed as exclusionary icons and even incitements to terror. In coming to see that our beliefs were mistaken, we also became aware of them as beliefs. We became aware that we had held assumptions about our landscape and that to the extent that for us Confederate symbols were neither notable nor malevolent, these assumptions were aspects of white privilege.

Such reflections precipitated actions beyond the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capital in Columbia, South Carolina. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., for example, removed images of the Confederate flag from two of its stained glass windows; the University of Louisville removed a Confederate monument near its campus; and New Orleans removed a series of memorials including a centrally located statue of Robert E. Lee and an obelisk honoring the resistance by the Crescent City White League against the Reconstruction era Louisiana state government in 1874. These changes testify to the transformative efficacy of experience. For Experiences, whether personal or virtual through film, photography, and the like, surprise and shock us. In doing so, they confront us with the hollowness of views and assumptions we may not have known we had and they change both how we understand and what we are willing to do. ⁴

Bohman does not dispute the importance of negative experience; one of his own examples is the effect of the Three Mile Island accident on the movement against nuclear power. While public opinion up until the time of the accident generally conceived of nuclear power as part of technological progress, thereafter, it focused more attentively on its risks and on industry accountability. Nevertheless, Bohman rejects the conclusion that experience of the accident was sufficient on its own to change public opinion. An earlier and worse accident in 1966 had been understood simply as an engineering mishap, news of which was buried in the back pages of newspapers (Bohman 1996, 213). If the Three Mile Island event was understood differently, according to Bohman, it was because of an already emerging anti-nuclear power movement in the context of which it could serve as a “crucial discourse moment” ⁵ for the effort to slow down the spread of nuclear energy (Bohman 1996, 211). He therefore contends that experiences spark meaningful reconsiderations only insofar as they become part of the give and take of public deliberation, where they can help existing or nascent social critics and social movements challenge existing understandings and form new publics.

Bohman is consequently suspicious of what he considers overly aestheticized notions of world disclosure that look to experiences of sudden illumination. His references here are Martin Heidegger and Richard Rorty, who, he worries, transfer the capacity for change from the political arena of discourse and deliberation to an aesthetic sphere that takes its bearings from the way experiences of art can open us to new worlds. Hence, Rorty looks to creative innovators while Heidegger’s example is Van Gogh’s painting of a peasant’s shoes through which we are able to experience “the toilsome tread of the worker” (Heidegger [1936] 1993, 159). For Bohman, the danger of such conceptions is that they bypass democratic efforts to convince others. The Three Mile Island accident may have contributed to a shift in the public perception of nuclear power so that it better appreciated its risks. Still, Bohman denies that it did so in the aesthetically revelatory way that Heidegger attributes to Van Gogh’s painting. It did so rather as a focal point within ongoing public deliberation.

Yet Bohman himself offers an example that seems to lead in a different direction. George Orwell describes an experience he had in the Spanish Civil War going out “to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca.” Suddenly,

A man . . . jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards . . . Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him. ⁶

Here Orwell moves from seeing the man as a Fascist to seeing him as a fellow-creature on the strength of “the detail about the trousers,” a transition that would seem to be immediate and to arise from the same sort of disclosive experience that Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes effects. Indeed, Frederic Schick, from whom Bohman takes the reference to Orwell, describes the transition as a “conversion” (Schick 1991, 5). Moreover, to the extent that Orwell is able to get us to see the detail about the trousers we no longer see the soldier as a Fascist either. In switching the story from the first to the second person, Orwell addresses us, telling us we see the soldier as a fellow-creature and no longer feel like shooting at him.

For Bohman, Orwell presumably functions here less a creative artist than as a social critic. In its attempt to change public perceptions and create new publics, social criticism may resort to indirect tactics including aesthetic ones in order to “let citizens see things in new ways.” Nevertheless, the merit of public deliberation is that it need not rely on collective transformative experiences. Pacifists need not wait for everyone to have Orwell’s experience but can mount objections to war and try to convince others of their salience, relying on the ordinary process of deliberative give and take. Yet suppose the impact of deliberative give and take is itself experiential in a world disclosive way? This idea is one that Gadamer suggests in his account of experience. Indeed, whereas Bohman suggests that the value of experience depends on the way it is taken up in critical discourse and discussion, Gadamer moves in the opposite direction: the value of discussion depends on its capacity to spark negative, reorienting experiences. Where we open ourselves to the claims of others, as we open ourselves to works of art, we can be unsettled and pulled up short. We can avoid such dialogic experiences in various ways—for example, by objectifying others and reducing their claims to the motivations they may have had for making them or by affecting to empathize with others and appropriating their claims as ones we have already made. Nevertheless, to the extent that we are open to the claims of others rather than distancing ourselves from them or “reflecting out” of the encounter, in Gadamer’s words, we can experience a conversion in understanding equivalent to that which Orwell experiences in no longer seeing a Fascist. To this extent, experiential illumination provides the model for dialogic efficacy.

3. Conclusion

The 1831-1832 debate in the Virginia House of Delegates raises a question about public deliberation: where the terms of a debate are blinkered and even obscene, what can be done to change them? A deliberative model of democracy distinguishes between debate in formal institutions and organizations and more informal debate in the public sphere. While the former takes up issues and proposals with the goal of making decisions, the latter considers recommendations, perspectives, and interpretations of events in a more free-flowing way unpressured by the need for timely resolution. Where institutional debate becomes rigid and inflexible, the deliberative model can look to the informal public sphere to unblock it. Where the informal public sphere is itself rigid and inflexible, the deliberative model, as Bohman presents it, can look to social critics and social movements to redirect deliberative orientations.

In the case of the debate over abolishing slavery in Virginia, the two tracks of formal and informal deliberation were equally exclusionary. The formal debate may have proceeded in compliance with acknowledged rules and processes. Speakers may have listened to one another, taken up one another’s concerns and views and sustained their mutual cooperation in trying to resolve what they saw as their slavery issue. At the same time, not only did the deliberation violate norms of publicity, more than one delegate explicitly rejected them. Informal debate in the white public sphere provided no recourse, and social critics such as the Society of Friends had no success in creating new white Virginian publics. As the formal debate in the House of Delegates closed Thomas Jefferson Randolph and other Virginian gradualists were optimistic that slavery would soon be eradicated in the Commonwealth and the former slaves deported. Yet instead of abolishing slavery even on the disgraceful terms the Virginian abolitionists favored, Virginia passed new laws and tightened restrictions on both slaves and free African Americans.

Violations of conditions of publicity go a long way to illuminating the shortcomings of the 1831-1832 debate in Virginia. Looking at it from afar, we can clearly see it as a closed echo chamber that excluded all those it needed to hear. Nevertheless, Bohman’s account of public deliberation is meant to serve as more than a critical standard for adjudicating deliberative conditions and is meant, rather, to provide guidance to actual political practice. Here its efficacy remains unclear. For, if deliberations exclude others on the basis of bigoted and prejudiced views, it is not clear that argument alone can motivate them to change. The ability of social critics and social movements to bring participants to their senses and change the terms of debate also remains unclear.

Nevertheless, Bohman argues against abandoning the aims of deliberative theory for philosophies of aesthetic world disclosive experience. In his view, the latter remove the possibility of new understandings from the ordinary realm of public discussion and transfer them to the realm of art or poetry. In doing so, they “lead to an anti-democratic and elitist view of the limits of democratic politics” and “make it impossible for us to understand the rationality of social and political change” (Bohman 1996, 216). If by aesthetic world disclosive experiences we mean those in which we are pulled up short and come to see or understand what we previously could not, then not all are elitist in the way Bohman assumes. At the same time, we might add to Bohman’s criticism of experiences of aesthetic world disclosure a recognition of the often grievous nature of experience. Can it really only be experiences such as the murder of people praying at church that can shake our assumptions and by disclosing a new world to us reorient our frameworks? Are we then to appreciate and even look forward to such experiences? And can we be sanguine about what we might come to understand from them? What did white Virginians take away from the experience of Nat Turner’s insurrection?

These questions point to the need to balance experience and deliberation, and they require us to continue to try to steer public deliberation as closely as possible to the conditions of non-tyranny, equality, and publicity that provide for perspectives and arguments relevant to the best possible decisions. Yet we need also, I think, to be attentive to the value of experience. For what happens when we can no longer have it? What happens when we become desensitized, when experiences of events and depictions of experiences in the form of paintings, photographs, and the like no longer have the power to surprise us or pull us up short? Publics need to be able to react—whether through dismay, fury, sorrow, or disbelief. In the United States, this capacity may be disappearing. In the face of the experiences in which the expansion of various forms of media now allow us to participate—police killings of African Americans, gun violence of massive proportions, expanding inequality, a climate in crisis, and a government explicitly catering only to the rich—it is no longer clear that the U.S. public can still have experiences. Social critics and protest movements are surely crucial to framing our experiences. But an inability to be shocked bodes ill for democracy.