Slavery and the Republic

As America begins to celebrate its semiquincentennial, much ink has been spilled (originally under the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement) to call into question whether that event is worth commemorating at all. Currently, some 4,500 American school systems have adopted the 1619 Project, first published by the New York Times, as a classroom text, a work that claims America’s true origin lies not in 1776 but in 1619 (when a cargo of about 20 African slaves was landed in the English colony that later became Georgia). According to this work, the factual accuracy and principles of which have been challenged by numerous mainstream scholars, that landing set the stage for the Declaration of Independence, since some signatories and leading ratifiers of that document were slaveowners, which supposedly proves that when they wrote “all men are created equal,” they didn’t regard black people as human beings entitled to individual rights. From the outset, the argument runs, America was a nation built on slavery, whose very prosperity and political freedom (for white people only) depended on that institution’s survival.

Ironically, this argument reflects the infamous ruling of Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) that America’s founders could not have included black people in the category of those naturally entitled to freedom, lest their possession of slaves make them hypocrites. (In reality, acting as defense attorney for an abolitionist minister 39 years earlier, Taney himself – who had emancipated his own slaves – had acknowledged the Founders’ view of slavery as an evil inconsistent with the Declaration’s principles, the perpetuation of which was a “hard necessity” which they were compelled by their British inheritance to accept “for a time” pending its ultimate abolition. But by 1857, animated by hatred of the abolitionist movement and perhaps foolishly thinking that his ruling would prevent a civil war, Taney changed his tune.)

Amid today’s debate, Joseph Ellis’s The Great Contradiction could not be timelier. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Ellis is the author of a dozen excellent books on the Founding. He is a firm critic of the injustice not only of American slavery but also of the Founders’ mistreatment of the continent’s indigenous, “Indian” inhabitants. At the same time, he demonstrates the Founders’ awareness that their tolerance and practice of slavery violated their professed principles, albeit a practice that they had no capacity to abolish if they wanted to establish a union, given its widespread existence in the southern states. Thus, they could only hope for its gradual elimination. And he describes as well the efforts of the leading Founders, including George Washington, guided by a sense of justice, to reach an agreement with Indian leaders that would enable them to retain autonomous territory east of the Mississippi, only to be defeated by the sheer multitude of “white” settlers seeking land to cultivate.

Ellis sets the stage by noting that “between 1550 and 1860, European vessels embarked with 12.5 million African captives and landed 10.7 million in the New World” (the remaining 1.8 million dying en route). However, he adds that of the 10.7 million, only 400,000 went to North America, along with 60,000 shipped via the West Indies. Thus, black slavery was hardly a peculiarly “American” dilemma. And, Ellis observes, until the mid-eighteenth century, “one would be hard-pressed to hear any criticism” of this lucrative enterprise, since “[m]oral blindness made eminent economic sense.” (But he also notes that at the same time, “between fourteen and sixteen million Africans were carried east” into slavery … by Muslims.)

Although Ellis properly identifies Enlightenment philosophers, including Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Hume (along with, in America, the Quakers) as instigators of the sudden movement demanding emancipation, he errs in one respect. He wrongly claims as evidence that until then “Western civilization lacked a conscience” that not only the popes but such philosophers as “Plato, Socrates, Aristotle,” and Locke regarded this practice as “acceptable.” But Ellis is a historian, not a philosophical scholar. A close study of Aristotle’s Politics, such as was undertaken by scholars like Mary Nichols (Citizens and Statesmen), demonstrates that the “natural” slavery he justifies has nothing to do with slavery as practiced in ancient Greece or anywhere else (to say nothing of the fact that even Greek slavery fell well short in barbarity of its modern Western counterpart). As for Locke, not only does he treat slavery in his Second Treatise as “the state of war, continued” (since it directly contradicts his doctrine of equal natural rights), historian Holly Brewer has documented (American Historical Review, October, 2017) his earnest endeavor, when holding office, to end the practice – only to be defeated by the greed of Queen Anne. Only during the Enlightenment did philosophers gain the power to openly challenge the evil institution; how they gained such influence is a story beyond the ken of this review (but see, most recently, Harvey C. Mansfield, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy). In consequence, the United States became the first nation in history explicitly to be founded on the doctrine of all people’s equal rights.

Ellis explores with a mixture of indignation and a degree of practical sympathy the reasons that prevented the Founders from giving full effect to the doctrine they had enunciated. Beyond the unwillingness of most masters in heavily slaveowning states to abandon the economic and “social” foundation of their inherited way of life lay the sheer problem of what would become of the hundreds of thousands of slaves inhabiting those states following emancipation, since “no other nation in the world had ever embraced, let alone achieved,” a “biracial society.” And horrifying as the abuses of black slavery throughout the Americas were, Ellis reminds those who would deny the sincerity of most Founders’ aspiration to bring about abolition simply because they failed to do so immediately after independence, to consider “the alternative scenario provided by the French and Russian revolutions, where justice imposed led to justice destroyed,” in the form of “the guillotine and Napoleon” in France, “in Russia the firing squad wall and Lenin, then Stalin.”

Following his opening “Overviews” of the problem, Ellis devotes the core of his book to tracing the Founders’ unsuccessful attempts to resolve it. As he notes, the abolitionist movement initially took hold during the Revolution in five northern states, where the “core values” of the Declaration became the rationale for either immediate or gradual emancipation. Indeed, in “all-important Virginia” (the largest state, holding the largest number of slaves), the constitution drafted by George Mason (whose language about rights was copied in the Declaration) would further have advanced emancipation – had it not been modified in the legislature owing to the influence of “several prominent planters.”

As the War for Independence moved to the South, one of the book’s great heroes, John Laurens (Alexander Hamilton’s closest friend), made his appearance. The son of one of South Carolina’s richest planters, Laurens broke with his father over his horror at the “despairing multitude” of slaves ”toiling for the Luxuries of Merciless Tyrants.” After his proposal (endorsed by both Hamilton and Washington) to raise an all-black regiment of enslaved African-Americans who would be “offered freedom in return for service in defending Charleston” was roundly rejected by the state legislature, Laurens died leading a cavalry charge in defense of Savannah.

Following the American victory, Washington, whose attitude towards slavery was gradually evolving, refused to sign a petition drafted by Virginia planters protesting Britain’s failure to comply with a treaty provision requiring the return of slaves who had escaped to British lines, since “he did not want his name associated with” the scheme. Indeed, nearly half the runaways who remained in British hands made it to freedom in England, thanks to the effort of “two British officers” who put “honor above duty.” But most remaining escapees were either recaptured by their masters or died of disease; Ellis calls for constructing a “Many Thousands Gone” memorial to them at Arlington Cemetery. Following the war, however, Ellis notes a split between the “Old Dominion” of Virginia, where the egalitarian spirit of the Declaration was still “throbbing away” – hence the state’s authorizing owners in 1782 “to free their slaves” at their discretion – and the unwavering attachment of South Carolina and Georgia to the “peculiar institution” on which their life supposedly depended.

As Ellis argues in the following chapter, despite the vehement condemnations at the Constitutional Convention by delegates like Gouverneur Morris, no document that failed to compromise with those states “could ever have been passed or ratified.” He nonetheless cites not only the circumlocutory language with which the Constitution addresses slavery (a point later stressed by Lincoln and Frederick Douglass), so as to leave no verbal trace once the institution were abolished, but the fact that all southern delegates to the outgoing Confederation Congress voted for the provision of the Northwest Ordinance that permanently forbade the entry of “involuntary servitude” into the Northwest Territory – as if in an “unspoken bargain” with antislavery forces.

All hopes for peaceful abolition were sealed, Ellis judges, by such subsequent developments as the Haitian revolution, the cotton gin, and the dominance of the presidency by the “Virginia dynasty” from Jefferson through Monroe. But in his seventh chapter he turns to the earnest efforts of the Washington administration, in the spirit of the Declaration, to reach a just settlement of land claims with the Indians, the underlying hope being that providing them with instruction and tools necessary for farming would not only enable them to advance in civilization, but “reduce the size of the territory necessary” for their survival. While the plan was doomed to failure, in reading of the negotiations, we learn of a second largely unsung (if flawed) hero, the mixed-breed Creek chief Alexander McGillivray, “the most talented Indian statesman of his time” (ultimately made a brigadier general in the American army in the hope of winning his and other chiefs’ loyalties away from Spain).

Part III of the volume, “Southern Vistas,” addresses, respectively, the retrospective viewpoints and actions of Washington and Jefferson regarding the slavery issue. Following his retirement from the Presidency – an act that earned him even greater renown than his previous military and political successes and his resignation from the post of Commander in Chief – Washington was more preoccupied than ever with how he would be remembered by future generations. He had long “struggled” with the issue of emancipation, following receipt of a letter in 1785 from another Virginia planter, a Quaker who had freed his eighty slaves, counseling Washington that his failure to do likewise would stain his reputation. Ultimately, in his will Washington authorized the emancipation of his slaves (as distinguished from those owned by his wife) upon the latter’s death, followed by their being educated and trained for “some useful occupation,” while being allowed to remain in Virginia (unlike the usual practice, which required freed slaves to move elsewhere lest they contaminate the local bloodline). Ellis judges that Washington thus made himself “a singular figure” among planters, implicitly “holding open the prospect of an emerging biracial society.”

Despite his having been the primary author of the Declaration, the trajectory of Jefferson’s speech and actions regarding slavery, during the quarter-century he outlived Washington, was quite different. When visited by his old comrade Lafayette in 1824, he evaded or resisted the latter’s entreaty to free his slaves (accompanied by a recently-published address from the black community of Boston to the same effect). His grounds varied from the likely inherent inferiority of black people to whites, preventing them from ever sharing equal citizenship, to the fact that he didn’t really “own” the slaves, since (owing to his extravagance) they “belonged” to his creditors. In consequence, following his death, his “130 valuable Negros” were auctioned off, families broken up as they were “sold down the river,” a fate Jefferson had promised would never occur.

As Ellis demonstrated in his biography American Sphinx, Jefferson, despite his many accomplishments, truly lacked self-knowledge.

David Lewis Schaefer is professor of political science, emeritus at College of the Holy Cross. His books include Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007) and The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (second printing, 2019). He is a three-time NEH Fellow.