Politics & Power Quote by Leonard Bacon

A preacher’s version of the nuclear option: if slavery isn’t wrong, then the word “wrong” has no meaning. Leonard Bacon isn’t arguing policy; he’s defending the moral vocabulary itself. The line works because it refuses the comfortable middle ground that 19th-century American politics specialized in - the procedural compromise, the “states’ rights” fog, the careful distinction between regrettable and unjust. Bacon detonates that evasion with a stark syllogism: accept the Southern legal order as legitimate, and you’ve emptied conscience of content.

The repetition is the point. “That form of government, that system of social order... those laws” piles up like an indictment read aloud, forcing listeners to confront slavery not as a private cruelty but as an engineered regime. By anchoring the evil in “laws,” he targets the era’s favorite alibi: that bondage was a cultural inheritance rather than a deliberate, maintained structure. His phrasing “by virtue of which slavery exists there, and is what it is” presses the reader to look at the institution in full - not a softened abstraction, but the machinery and its outcomes.

Context matters: Bacon was a Northern clergyman in a country trying to keep a union stitched together by moral euphemism. His intent is pastoral and political at once - to make neutrality feel like complicity and to shame moderates who treated slavery as a bargaining chip. The subtext is a warning: when a society legalizes atrocity, it doesn’t just wound its victims; it corrupts the categories everyone uses to tell right from wrong.