New Haven Independent

So said New Haven’s Robert Pierce Forbes (at right in photo), a member of New Haven’s Amistad Committee and the author of a new book on the Missouri Compromise and the bitter debate over extending slavery into Missouri and the western territories.

In a context-giving lecture at the New Haven Museum & Historical Society on Tuesday, Forbes asserted that it was during that national crisis that Americans learned to practice the mental trick to talk about race without overtly talking about it, a “walling off” he said that we practice at our peril down to this day.

Robert Forbes is a professor at the University of Connecticut, Torrington. His book is The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Forbes, whose lecture was introduced by Al Marder (pictured), the president of the Amistad Committee, focused on the men of the Connecticut U.S. Congressional delegation such as Sen. David Daggett (after whom the street in the Hill is named). Daggett was one of the founders of the Yale Law School who voted with the south on the compromise that permitted slavery in Missouri as long as Maine came in as a free state. They were called “doughboys” — perhaps, it was said at the time because they looked themselves in the mirror and were afraid of their own faces. Several suffered repercussions in their careers.

“The Missouri debates were the frankest discussion of slavery and race,” Forbes said, “in part because parties were in disarray and people could speak their consciences about what America really stands for.”

Passions flew between slavery supporters and those whose vision of the country’s future would follow the natural rights and equality for all men philosophy of the enlightenment. The latter, Forbes said, were made so far less by genuine belief, and far more likely because with nearly 500,000 blacks owned, the slave-based agricultural industries represented the highest investment of capital, next to land, in the country.

“With every southern congressman and senator deriving his monthly income from slaves,” said Forbes, “how could they be honest with their feelings? It quickly became clear the issue could shatter the union, and after the Missouri debates, the conversation took place,” he said, “in a kind of code.” People seemed to realize, without even saying it, that the issue could not be solved politically.

During the 1830s Daggett worked against establishing a Negro college in New Haven, and in the 1840s voted that Negroes, both free and slave, could not become citizens of the U.S. His opinions — he had become a Connecticut State Supreme Court justice - were cited in the Dred Scott decision.

Yet, miraculously, and perhaps in response to the great social progress of Negroes in Connecticut, he had a complete turnaround and voted in 1847 to give blacks the franchise.

“Even today,” said Forbes, “we’re stripping away all the structures we’ve built up to justify slavery and getting back to the enlightenment.”

Forbes’ talk was part of much interesting programming planned at the New Haven Museum and Historical Society this winter and spring under the energetic leadership of Bill Hosley (on the left chatting with museum patron Abu Clark.)

The museum’s New Urbanism Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday, — click here for titles and times — takes on the development (and undermining) of public transportation, suburbia, malls, and how with 169 separate local governments that talk the talk of coming together to solve big problems, but like slavery, may not really be able to embrace it.

Clark, a young man in the insurance business in New Haven for just two years, told Hosley that he loves history, and intends to come back to the museum for the film festival, and more.