Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Slavery and America’s Founding

SLAVERY DEFINED THE GREATEST PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLICY QUESTION that confronted the founders of the United States. To preserve this “peculiar institution,” the Constitution was filled with oddities designed to ensure the ability of the slave states, predominantly in the South, to protect their political power. Even as slaves were deprived of their freedom and despite the Declaration’s proclamation that “all men are created equal,” slaves—the word is never used in the Constitution—were counted by the Constitution as three fifths of a free person or, for that matter, as three fifths of a person bound to service for a fixed number of years.3 This created, among many peculiarities, the notion that congressional representation was dictated not by the number of eligible voters in a state or even by the number of citizens, but by a mix of citizens, indentured people (often immigrants), and a vast number of noncitizens who were enslaved. This meant that slave states received greater congressional representation than their free citizen population warranted. So, those interested in preserving slavery were, by virtue of their holding slaves, given increased representation, and therefore increased policy control in the very federal government that was founded allegedly on the basis that all men are created equal. Furthermore, each unfortunate slave’s very existence counted toward and contributed to the reinforcement of a regime in which he or she was to be oppressed as a matter of law and without hope of betterment.

The three-fifths rule, of course, also biased the Electoral College and, therefore, the selection of the president in favor of proslavery interests. After all, the number of state electors in the Electoral College was (and still is) determined by the size of the state’s congressional delegation, which prior to emancipation was a function of its population, including the disenfranchised slave population.4 The peculiarity of how political power was distorted in favor of slave states was all the more emphatic as it was increasingly out of touch with how the founding fathers—and the rest of the world—professed to look upon slavery.

Despite having been enshrined in the constitutional processes of election and political representation, slavery was politically contested from the outset. Many of the most prominent founding fathers, even among those who were slave holders, were embarrassed by slavery, or at least professed to be. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both declared the injustice of slavery even as they persisted in owning and exploiting slaves for their personal gain. In his will, Washington left a modest annuity of $30 to his faithful slave William Lee, who accompanied him throughout the revolution.5 Further, in that document Washington set out the terms of the liberation of most of his human property.6 He was the only southern founding father to manumit most of his slaves or to give them the option of choosing to be free. And, we should also note, he was sensitive in his lifetime, as in his will, to prevent the division of slave families in his possession. Since many of his slaves were married to his wife’s dower slaves, he kept them on even when it would have been profitable to sell them. Indeed, he acknowledged that he held approximately twice as many slaves at Mount Vernon as would have been profitable, retaining them out of concern to maintain the integrity of their families.7

Still, the same George Washington also signed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793, making it lawful for slave owners to recover their “property” even if the slave had escaped to an area where slavery was banned. Indeed, he pursued one of his own runaway slaves during his presidency. Another escapee apparently found enforced service in the Washington household sufficiently objectionable that he fought against Washington and on behalf of the British during the revolution, while still others of Washington’s slaves sought their liberty by supporting the British against the rebels.8 So, clearly, Washington’s relationship to slavery was complex even as he professed his dislike of the institution.

Thomas Jefferson, commenting on slavery and the objectives of the American Revolution, wrote in June 1786, “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro’ his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”9 And while he manumitted hardly any slaves of his own, he did propose for the state of Virginia in 1783 that the “General assembly shall not have power . . . to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st. day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.”10 Unlike the statement in 1786 that we might cynically interpret as no more than rhetoric, the proposal in 1783 was politically bold and likely to cost him support in Virginia and elsewhere in the South. In that sense, it is harder to dismiss the proposal of 1783 as a statement without substance. Although to be sure Washington’s and Jefferson’s own conduct did not coincide with their rhetoric, still we cannot avoid the sentiment that, however insufficiently the view was expressed, these two powerful Virginia slaveholding founding fathers were apparently embarrassed by the institution even as they profited from it.

Such northern founding fathers as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were unquestionably more vehement in their opposition to the continuation of slavery. Yet, forging a successful union against Britain meant that they had to live with compromise, and so they compromised by accepting a federal government structure that protected the power and authority of state governments to preserve their own institutions, including slavery. Without the constitutional guarantees given to the South, it is unlikely that the United States could have been formed. Against this backdrop, the nation, from its birth, felt the political pain associated with deep divisions over what came to be called states’ rights, not to mention what today we call human rights.

We should not forget that while slavery persisted as an alleged economic necessity in the South and in the Caribbean, it was an institution in its political, if not economic, death throes throughout much of the world.11 Indeed, slavery in the American colonies was banned by Spain as early as 1542. As early as 1569, the English courts are thought to have judged in the Cartwright case “that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.”12 With the original documentation of that quotation lost in the mists of time, we might equally consider that an English court ruled in 1763 that as “soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free.”13 The antislavery movement continued its spread across Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving few governments that tolerated human bondage well before US states fought the bloodiest American war, the Civil War, to resolve the issue.

No one can reasonably dispute that the founding fathers constructed a Constitution and specific rules of representation that favored slaveholders. Yet the slavery question came to a head not during the writing of the Constitution, but later, during the landmark Supreme Court decision made in 1857. That decision had a profound impact on the country, and also on a little-known politician, who before 1857 had bounced from electoral defeat to electoral defeat: Abraham Lincoln.

The Great Divide: Dred Scott