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Sometimes doing the right thing doesn't pay...but that doesn't mean we don't do the right thing...
When I sat in my dull-witted history classes growing up, I was under the impression that the American Revolutionary War generation just didn't get it. That they were a slave owning populace that had to be jolted into doing the right thing later by the Civil War. That was the simplicity of how history was taught...a memorization of dates and events with no patience for history's subtleties or real critical thinking about it. That means that real history was never taught us.
The fact remains that the morality of slavery was an open question, that it was already tearing at the fabric of America, and that there were many conscientious people then who decried it.
On the other hand, it is one thing to decry things-anyone can decry-it's a whole nother thing to take steps to rectify them. That's where true heroism comes in.
John Payne was Dolley Madison's father (the future first lady of the United States) and a plantation owner in rural Virginia. Although a relatively small percentage of the population owned slaves, most plantation owners did. It was built into their economics. Payne was no exception.
In 1782, a Virginia state law passed that allowed slave owners to free their slaves completely and immediately, rather than sell them or emancipate them gradually. Payne was a Quaker. His conscience got to him. It was a huge financial risk. It would mean a complete change of profession because he would no longer have the slave labor that made his plantation economically feasible. But he felt duty-bound and he did it. Later that same year, he freed every one of his slaves; immediately, wholly and completely.
If this were a movie Payne would have struggled to get his professional life on track, but after that requisite good versus evil battle he would emerge triumphant, the music would play, we would tear up in admiration, and the credits would roll.
This was not a movie.
According to Elizabeth Dowling Taylor's book, A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons, Payne gave up his plantation and moved his family to Philadelphia, leaving all that was familiar behind. There he became a starch merchant, promptly failed and went bankrupt. The Quakers didn't tolerate people not pulling their own weight, and so excommunicated him because of his bankruptcy.
(Isn't it interesting that the Quakers could tolerate him being a slave owner-no excommunication for that-but found bankruptcy intolerable?)
This so depressed John Payne that he went into seclusion-for years he wouldn't come out of his room. He died a devastated and broken man in 1792. It's quite possible that the consequences of her father's decision prompted Dolley's later refusal to free slaves that her husband, James Madison, had promised to free upon his death.
Where's the music now?
So the question: If life doesn't reward an action does that mean that that action shouldn't be taken? In John Payne's day, I can promise you that his life was used as an ominous warning to others-he freed his slaves and look what happened to him!
But sometimes in business, and in life, right can be self-inflicting.
Make no mistake about it, I'd rather be rewarded. Often our decisions will benefit us and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If Payne would have become a business success story that would not have made his decision to free his slaves any less right.
But the question remains...can we make the other decision...the one that helps others and hurts ourselves? The self-sacrificing one? The one that puts our own necks on the line simply because it's right?
There, in that very spot, is where the moral high ground is won and real leadership is cast.
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