Slavery and the Founders
Our Founders were not Ignorant
By John D. Turner
"He has waged cruel war
against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of
life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never
offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation
thither. This piratical warefare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers,
is the warfare of a CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to
keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has
prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt
to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce".
-Thomas Jefferson
The Declaration of Independence: Original Draft
How different American History might have been
had these words, penned by Thomas Jefferson in his original draft of
the Declaration of Independence, been allowed to stand. Words, which
condemned the British king for allowing the slave trade to flourish,
and for introducing slavery into the colonies in the first place.
Words which the delegations from Georgia and South Carolina, who
were unwilling to acknowledge that slavery violated the "most sacred
rights of life and liberty", found offensive and therefore were
stricken from the final document.
So what are we taught concerning those
founders of our country and the issue of slavery in America?
Does it show them to be hypocrites?
After all, Jefferson, at the time he wrote the
above words owned nearly 200 slaves. George Washington, the father
of his country, owned slaves as did James Madison, the father of the
Constitution. Does this make the birthing of the United States
somehow illegitimate? Does this mean that the Constitution was
written only for whites? What about that clause stating that slaves
count only as 3/5ths of a person. Isn’t that dehumanizing?
In his writing "A Note on Slavery and the
American Founding", author Matthew Spalding addresses these issues
much better than I, and I would suggest reading his article, which I
have used as a reference for my own. It has been noted that many of
the founders owned slaves. Likewise many did not. Whereas some were
outspoken in their defense of that "peculiar institution", others
were just as vehemently opposed. Like as not, many in the country
probably didn’t care one way or another, as is true on many issues.
Be that as it may, many who actually owned slaves were very much
against the practice.
Washington, in 1786 wrote concerning slavery:
"there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to
see a plan adopted for the abolition of it."
Madison called it:
"the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man."
Jefferson proposed legislation during his
first term in the House of Burgesses to emancipate slaves in
Virginia but was soundly defeated.
Our founders were not ignorant. They fully
recognized that the issue of slavery was the one great flaw in the
founding of America. As John Quincy Adams, the fifth president of
the United States and the son of John Adams, our second president
stated in 1837:
"The inconsistency of the institution of slavery
with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and
lamented."
He went on to say that nevertheless:
"no charge of
insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never
from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the
institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach
fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country and they saw
that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence
slavery, in common with every mode of oppression, was destined
sooner or later to be banished from the earth."
John Quincy, being only 60 years away from the
founding, and having a personal knowledge of some of the men who
were actually there (not the least of whom being his own father),
should certainly be more knowledgeable concerning such matters that
Mr. Clinton, who recently stated that:
"here in the United States we
were founded as a nation that practiced slavery…".
Only in a country peopled by citizens ignorant
of the issues and circumstances surrounding its founding and the
beliefs and writings of its founders, could such a statement be
greeted by the sound of applause, rather than hoots of derision.
But then again, how many of us even know who
John Quincy Adams was, much less what he may have said.
If this were a country founded as a nation
that practiced slavery, you would think there would be some mention
made in the Declaration, certainly in the Constitution, cementing
and upholding such an institution. Yet none is to be found. At the
time, strong regional interests supported the maintenance of slavery
and the slave trade, and mitigated against its abolition at that
time. There were over 500,000 slaves in the US at the time, the bulk
of which resided in Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and
South Carolina, comprising over 40% of their population. Just as
with the Declaration, compromise with the pro-slavery interests was
necessary in order to obtain the unified support needed to ratify
and successfully establish the Constitution.
Three compromises were made and approved by
the delegates at the Constitutional Convention.
One concerned the slave trade and prohibited
Congress from blocking the "migration" and importation of "such
Persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to
admit" (Article I, Section 9). This allowed the slave states to
continue the slave trade, but only until 1808. Notably, it did not
prevent the separate states from passing laws abolishing the slave
trade in their own states, which many did. It only prevented
Congress from enacting a national prohibition for a period of time.
Congress later passed, and President Jefferson signed into law, a
national prohibition against the slave trade, effective 1 January
1808, the very first day such a law could be constitutionally
enacted.
Another concerned fugitive slaves,
guaranteeing the return upon claim of any "Person held to Service or
Labour in one state, under the Laws thereof" who had escaped from
that state to another (Article IV, Section 2). It has been noted the
phrase "under the laws thereof" emphasized that slaves were held
according to the laws of individual states, and made it impossible
to infer from the passage that the Constitution itself legally
sanctioned slavery.
Finally, there is the famous three-fifths
rule, part of the section on enumeration, which states that
apportionment for Representatives and taxation purposes will be
determined by the number of free people and three-fifths "of all
other persons" (Article I, Section 2). You will note that the word
"slaves" does not appear here. Of course, everyone knows what it
means. You will also note that the word "negroes", blacks, or any
other descriptive term for people from Africa is also missing.
The common accepted meaning these days is that
this clause was intended to denigrate those of African heritage as
being less than a person, of only being "three-fifths" as good as a
white man. This is a total misreading of history which can only be
made in ignorance of the facts. For one, this provision was proposed
by Mr. James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who was in fact an anti-slavery
delegate. Its purpose was to penalize slaveholders, who wanted to
count each of their slaves as a whole person for purposes of
according their states more representation in the House of
Representatives.
Remember that a full 40% of the population of
the five southernmost states was comprised of slaves. This
compromise was an attempt by the anti-slavery faction to decrease
the power of the slave states, and therefore reduce their ability to
oppose anti-slavery or enact pro-slavery legislation in Congress. It
had nothing to do whatsoever with any kind of statement on the
comparative "worth" of blacks vs. whites. Indeed, as noted above,
this clause does not say anything about blacks generally, but only
talks about "free people" and "all other persons". This is because
free blacks (of which there were many) were understood to be free
persons, and were enumerated as whole persons.
It is notable that the words "slave" and
"slavery" appear nowhere in the Constitution. This is both
significant and deliberate. As Madison recorded in his notes
concerning the convention, the delegates "thought it wrong to admit
in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."
The Constitution was designed as an Ideal, the fact that the country
at the time failed to live up to the Ideal in no manner invalidates
the attempt; the groundwork for eventual emancipation was set.
Frederick Douglas believed that the Federal
Government:
"was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery
government."
In 1864 he wrote:
"Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a
sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was
purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim,
of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the
government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent
structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed."
Far
from being just another "dead white guy", Mr. Douglas was born a
slave in Maryland, and later escaped to become a prominent spokesman
for free blacks in the abolitionist movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw this clearly as
well, referring to the Declaration of Independence as a "promissory
note", written for future use, applicable to all times, peoples, and
places. Is it only in the last 35 years that we have collectively as
a nation forgotten the particulars of our founding, settling instead
on simplistic platitudes based in "politically correct" falsehoods?
What would Dr King and Mr. Douglas make of Mr.
Clinton’s remarks regarding the founding of our nation, this noble
attempt to create a nation of laws, where individual liberty reigns
supreme, and the government works for the people and not the other
way around? What would be our founder’s reaction, to see what they
gave of their blood, sweat, and toil so casually demeaned and
misinterpreted for the sake of a 15 second sound bite, by one who
recently held the office of Chief Executive?
Clearly, it is incumbent upon us, the citizens
of the United States of America, to study and understand the history
of the founding of our nation. To know the background behind
decisions of the past, rather than simply applying the Pravda of
today to the world of yesterday.
In order to understand where we are today, and
make plans for where we want to go tomorrow, we need to understand
the principles of our founding and the issues of the past. We need
to know the truth, not what is currently in vogue to believe. We
need to know why things happened, in the context of their day, what
they were thinking, and their vision for the future. Don’t expect
that these things are being taught in the nation’s public schools;
they aren’t. We need to research them ourselves. A nation too lazy
to study its past has no future; particularly where individual
freedom and liberty are concerned.
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