Flashes of Panic

I’m re-reading another book—Lydia Bailey by Kenneth Roberts, a hardcover first edition which was my tangible inheritance from my paternal grandfather. Roberts was strongly opinionated, to the point of being caustic, and bowed to no sacred cows; to my knowledge, he was (and probably still is) the only American writer to write a historical novel about the American Revolution from the perspective of a Loyalist, (“Tory,”) Oliver Wiswell, apparently the only one of his books which Down East Books is not keeping in print. His argument at the time was that a great many of the colonies’ best and brightest had chosen to remain loyal to the King and, in many cases, had suffered for it, so there must have been some merit to their case.

At any rate, when I opened Lydia Bailey I was stunned by the opening paragraphs, which (with some updates) are as true now as when Roberts wrote it, and as they presumably were when his narrator, Albion Hamlin, started his tale (which took him from Portland to Boston, Haiti, and Tripoli) in 1800:

I’m not over-enthusiastic about books that teach or preach, but I may as well admit in the beginning that my primary reason for writing this book was to teach as many as possible of those who come after me how much hell and ruin are inevitably brought on innocent people and innocent countries by men who make a virtue of consistency.

All the great villains and small villains whom I met so frequently in the events I’m about to set down were consistent men—unimaginative men who consistently believed in war as a means of settling disputes between nations; equally misguided men who consistently believed that war must be avoided at all hazards, no matter what the provocation; narrow men who consistently upheld the beliefs and acts of one political party and saw no good in any other; shortsighted men who consistently refused to see that the welfare of their own nation was dependent on the welfare of every other nation; ignorant men who consistently thought that the policies of their own government should be supported and followed, whether those policies were right or wrong; dangerous men who consistently thought that all people with black skins are inferior to those with white skins […] And I know that any nation that cannot or will not avoid the dreadful pitfalls of consistency will be one with the dead empires whose crumbling monuments studded our battlegrounds in Haiti and in Africa.