There is some peril in judging the moral worth of figures, great and small, across history’s generations. That’s a lesson that Randolph B. Campbell’s “’A Sea of Blood and Smoking Ruin’: Reflections on Sam Houston and Slavery” might suggest to a reader. It did to this one.

The lead work in October’s Southwestern Historical Quarterly was taken from Campbell’s address at the awards luncheon of the Texas State Historical Association, of which I’m a card-carrying member. (Well, I paid my dues.) He is Regents Professor of History at the University of North Texas.

The piece is timely, too, around here, while the Port Arthur Independent School District’s leadership weighs whether the names of Robert E. Lee and Dick Dowling, two Confederates, should be removed from local elementary schools. It considers the good names of, among others, Houston and Abraham Lincoln, for whom two other public schools in this district are named.

Some distinctions merit mention. One is that Houston, though a slaveholder, was not a Confederate, and even left the Texas governor’s chair rather than take an oath to the fledgling Confederacy.

Another is that Lincoln, although a Republican and never a slaveholder, fell short on a scale of moral absolutism to Northern abolitionist Wendell Phillips; Campbell recalled that Phillips would have sooner seen the country fall than slavery continue. Lincoln stopped short of that, declaring his intent as president to first save the Union, even if slavery were limited geographically to the South.

Houston was born into Virginia’s slave society; his family owned slaves and continued to own slaves after they moved to Tennessee. There was slavery in Texas, too, and even where Houston lived, at times, among native Americans in the Indian Territory. He himself owned a dozen slaves at his death.

Campbell writes, “… he remained entangled in the peculiar institution for the entire seventy years of his life. … It was always a fact in his life.” He married a slave owner. He depended upon slaves to protect and sustain his family.

As a unionist, though, Houston preferred to limit slavery rather than allow it to spread and cause disruption or demise for the United States. He voted for the Compromise of 1850, against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Campbell noted he was the sole Southern Democrat to do that, and suffered for it.

Campbell contends rightly that Houston, who was a slaveholder, who never condemned slavery, who never sought its end, lived with a morally indefensible position, at least in comparison to abolitionists. But, he suggests, while Lincoln’s position was morally better than Houston’s — he never owned slaves and condemned the institution — he would have permitted it to continue where it was. Nor did he condemn slaveholders themselves: “They are just what we would be in their situation,” he said.

That was why Phillips condemned Lincoln in 1860 as “the slave hound of Illinois.” He might have at least called Lincoln a useful tool, had he been more generous.

That’s the difficulty that arises when we judge a life not for a person’s noblest efforts and successes but solely for their blind spots. Dick Dowling’s claim to fame is not that he supported slavery but that he defended Sabine Pass, bravely and brilliantly, against invaders in 1863. Lee is not known first as a slaveholder or slavery defender first but as a commanding general, and a brilliant one at that.

Likewise, Houston is known as the father of Texas’ independence, much like slaveholder George Washington was known as the father of our country. Lincoln is known best not for falling short of the moral absolutism of the abolitionists, but for steering Washington’s country through its darkest division, and setting into motion a stronger, more unified country on the other side.

In general, we name buildings in honor of people not for where they failed, but for where they succeeded. Thus, we have named Lee and Dowling and Houston elementary schools; we still honor Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, too, with school names, their failings notwithstanding.

Wendell Phillips might’ve had his own dark side, as most of us do.

Ken Stickney is editor of The Port Arthur News.