It’s nice to know about problems and people seem to like complaining about them, but these reactions don’t compare with solving them. Acting takes resolution. Gandhi wasn’t just thrown off a train. He resolved to fight the injustice.

Some historical heroes who transformed cultures wrote their experiences of such moments of resolution. We can learn from them. I find their words inspirational.

Robert Carter III

Robert Carter III freed his slaves when his neighbors Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison didn’t, showing that they could have. He wrote in his Deed of Gift (1791)—the document which implemented this freedom:

“I have for some time past been convinced that to retain them in Slavery is contrary to the true Principles of Religion and Justice, and that therefor it was my Duty to manumit them”

“I have with great Care and Attention endeavored to discover that Mode of Manumission from Slavery which can be effected consonant to Law and with the Least possible Disadvantage to my fellow Citizens.” “An immediate but a gradual Emancipation.”

For background, his biographer, Andrew Levy wrote: “If Carter is the anti-Jefferson, the man who did not lack the will to free his own slaves but who did lack the vision and clarity to make his love of freedom eloquent, then the Deed of Gift is the anti-Declaration of Independence, a document that makes liberty look dull but which is so absent of loopholes and contradictions that no result but liberty could prevail.”

Thomas Clarkson

Thomas Clarkson led the abolitionism movement in England.

As I wrote in Sustainability Simplified, he “learned of the cruelties of slavery inadvertently, researching for a student essay contest at Cambridge University. Heading home after winning, slavery “wholly engrossed my thoughts” leading to his mindset shift:

I stopped my horse occasionally, and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true. The more however I reflected upon them . . . the more I gave them credit . . . I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce worked with Clarkson. He wrote:

So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the [slave] trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.

Nelson Mandela

In the speech he said to the judge before being sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, he said words that continue to choke me up after reading them:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Henry David Thoreau

Why did he choose to live more or less alone in the woods?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

More to come

I’ll write more as I come across them. I welcome suggestions if you think of any.

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