by Jill Lepore
On March 4, 1815, the day after Congress tabled a resolution to abolish the three-fifths clause, haunted by the tragedy of his own and the nation’s malign political math, Jefferson attempted to calculate just how many generations would have to pass before a child with a full-blooded African ancestor could be called “white.” Under Virginia law—absurdity heaped upon absurdity—to be seven-eighths white was to be, legally, magically, white.
“Let us express the pure blood of the white in the capital letters of the printed alphabet,” Jefferson began, writing out his mathematical proof. “Let the first crossing be of a, a pure negro, with A, a pure white,” he went on. “The unit of blood of the issue being composed of the half of that of each parent, will be a/2 + A/2. Call it, for abbreviation, h (half blood).” This h was Elizabeth Hemings, Sally’s mother, the daughter of an Englishman, A, and an African woman, a. He labeled the second “pure white” B, a so-called quadroon, q, and the third “pure white” C. B was John Wayles, Sally’s father, and q, Sally herself. C was the third president of the United States. He concluded his proof:
Let the third crossing be of q and C, their offspring will be q/2 + C/2 = A/8 + B/4 + C/2, call this e (eighth), who having less than 1/4 of a, or of pure negro blood, to wit 1/8 only, is no longer a mulatto, so that a third cross clears the blood.55
To Jefferson, his children by Hemings were e, the third crossing, not black, because seven-eighths white: not three-fifths a person, but a whole.
Only four of Sally Hemings’s children lived to adulthood. She knew and they knew what Jefferson knew: if they left Monticello, they could pass for white, if they chose, reinventing themselves as citizens, making their own calculations, in a republic of blood.
OTHER MEN’S CONSCIENCES troubled them differently. In December 1816, a group of northern reformers and southern slave owners met in Washington at Davis’s Hotel for a meeting chaired by Henry Clay, the fast-talking Kentucky congressman and Speaker of the House. They’d gathered to discuss what to do about the nation’s growing number of free blacks. In 1790, there had been 59,467; by 1800, there were 108,398; in 1810, 186,446, to some a threatening multitude. The census made clear that the American population was growing at a rate never seen anywhere before, in the history of the world. Yet it made this much clear, too: the original thirteen eastern states were losing power, relative to the newer, western states. The institution of slavery, so far from dying the natural death predicted by the framers of the Constitution, was growing in the West, even as it was declining in the East. Two new states had lately entered the Union as free states: Ohio in 1803 and Indiana in 1816. Two more had entered as slave states: Louisiana in 1812 and Mississippi in 1816. But population growth in free states was outpacing that in slave states. And the population of free blacks was growing at a rate more than double that of the population of whites.
In Washington, the men who met in Davis’s Hotel decided upon a plan: they would found a colony in Africa, as Clay said, “to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.” They elected a president, Bushrod Washington, George Washington’s nephew and a Supreme Court justice. Andrew Jackson served as a vice president. They chose a name for their organization; they called it the American Colonization Society.56
By 1816, the divide between Republicans and Federalists had begun to align rather closely with the divide over the question of slavery. In his diary, John Quincy Adams, the son of the former president, who served as secretary of state for the new president, James Monroe, began calling the two parties the “slavery party” and the “free party.”57 Any extension of the Union threatened the balance between these two political forces. In 1819, Missouri, which had been settled by southerners, became the first part of the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio River to seek to enter the Union as a state. To the bill granting Missouri admission, James Tallmadge, a congressman from New York, introduced an amendment that would have banned slavery in the state. When one critic of the amendment said it would destroy the Union, Tallmadge replied, “Sir, if a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so!”58
The Tallmadge Amendment passed narrowly in the House but failed in the Senate. The debate that followed lasted more than two years. In wrestling with this question, members of Congress had the advantage of an extraordinary wealth of information about the population but suffered from a lack of historical perspective on the Constitution itself. The fifty-year vow of silence pledged by delegates to the constitutional convention—which prevented James Madison from publishing his Notes—meant that whatever logic there was to the three-fifths compromise was essentially unknowable. In November 1819, Madison, living in retirement in Virginia, answered a query about Missouri, explaining his view that the Constitution probably did not grant Congress the power to make the prohibition of slavery a condition of entering the Union and that, in any case, once Missouri became a state, it would have the right to institute slavery. For Madison, a member of the Colonization Society, the matter could be divided into a moral question, a matter of political arithmetic, and a constitutional one, a matter of law.
“Will it or will it not better the condition of the slaves, by lessening the number belonging to individual masters, and intermixing both with greater masses of free people?” Madison asked. “Will the aggregate strength, security, tranquility and harmony of the whole nation be advanced or impaired by lessening the proportion of slaves to the free people in particular sections of it?”59
Tallmadge and his supporters condemned the politics of slavery, assailing the injustice of slave representation, and insisted that whatever bargain had been made at the constitutional convention need not extend into states that had not existed in 1787. Their opponents, instead of defending slavery, insisted on the impracticability of emancipation by arguing that black people would never be able to live among white people as equals. “There is no place for the free blacks in the United States—no place where they are not degraded,” one argued. “If there was such a place, the society for colonizing them would not have been formed.”60 Behind Madison’s remarks about “lessening the proportion of slaves to the free people,” behind Jefferson’s tortured calculations about how many generations would have to pass before his own children could pass for “white,” lay this hard truth: none of these men could imagine living with descendants of Africans as political equals.
And yet Jefferson made good on his promise to Sally Hemings. His two oldest children with Sally, Beverly and Harriet, left Monticello, apparently with his approval. “Harriet. Sally’s run,” Jefferson wrote in 1822 in his “Farm Book,” where he kept track of his human property. Harriet Hemings hadn’t run. She was twenty-one, and Jefferson had set her free. “She was nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful,” recalled one of Jefferson’s overseers, who also said that Jefferson ordered him to give fifty dollars to Harriet, and had paid for her ride, by stage, to Philadelphia. From there she traveled on to Washington, where her brother Beverly had already settled. “She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman,” said Harriet’s brother Madison, the only one of Sally Hemings’s children to live his life as a black man. He seems never to have forgiven his sister. But he kept her secret. “I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered,” he said. “Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give,” he said, “but will not.”61
On the floor of Congress, men pounded on their desks, and they rose to make speeches, and they listened, intently or indifferently. Into the stale air of the room wafted another proposal. Southerners like Henry Clay and John Tyler began to make a mathematical argument about “diffusion”: if slavery were allowed in states like Missouri, people who wanted to own slaves would have to buy them from states like Virginia, and then slavery as an institution would grow in the West, but the number of slaves would be small. Meanwhile, the number of s
laves in the East would continue to decline, and in both places the ratio of slaves to white people would be low, which, it was expected, would make the condition of slaves better, and would lessen the likelihood that they would have children with whites. Might the blood of the nation be cleared?
“Diffusion is about as effectual a remedy for slavery as it would be for smallpox,” scoffed a Baltimore attorney named Daniel Raymond, in a thirty-nine-page pamphlet called The Missouri Question. Raymond was a member of the American Colonization Society, but, he argued, the idea “that the Colonization Society can under any circumstances, have any perceptible effect in eradicating slaves from our soil, is utterly chimerical.” It was a matter of Malthusianism: “as population increases in a geometrical ratio, it is utterly impossible by that means, to make any perceptible diminution of the number of blacks in our country. On the contrary, the curse of slavery will continue to increase and that in a geometrical ratio too, in spite of the utmost efforts of the Society.” Slavery would not simply disappear, Raymond insisted: “It is an axiom as true as the first problem in Euclid, that if left to itself it will every year become more inveterate and more formidable.”62
Southerners attacked Raymond on the floor of the Senate. Among other things, they pointed out that a moral objection that was geographically bounded—those who opposed slavery in the West promised they would leave it alone in the South—was hardly a deeply held conviction. Virginia senator James Barbour asked, “What kind of ethics is that which is bounded by latitude and longitude, which is inoperative on the left, but is omnipotent on the right bank of a river?” But Raymond’s math, at any rate, turned out to be right. Calculating the growth of the slave population based on its known rate of increase, Raymond predicted that the number of slaves in the United States, less than 900,000 in 1800, would be 1.9 million by 1830. He was very close; it would be 2 million.63
Month after month of pencil to paper, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, did not settle the matter of the ratio of white people to black people in the United States. Nor did the colonization scheme. (Only about three thousand African Americans ever left for Liberia.) The Missouri question was settled, more or less, by accident. In 1820, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts, petitioned to be admitted to the Union as a free state. Alabama had been admitted to the Union the summer before, as a slave state, making the number of free and slave states equal, at twelve each. Congress, eager to end the impasse over Missouri, devised a compromise that would retain the balance between slave and free states. Under the Missouri Compromise, a deal deftly brokered by Clay, ever after known as “the Great Compromiser,” Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and a line was set at 36˚30' latitude, the southern border of Missouri: any states formed out of territories above that line would enter the Union as free states, and any states below that line would enter as slave states. The three-fifths clause survived. But John Quincy Adams did not believe it would survive for long. “Take it for granted that the present is a mere preamble—a title page to a great, tragic volume,” he wrote in his diary. “The President thinks this question will be winked away by a compromise. But so do not I. Much am I mistaken if it is not destined to survive his political and individual life and mine.”64 He was not mistaken.
III.
THE FIRST FIVE PRESIDENTS of the United States, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, were diplomats, soldiers, philosophers, and statesmen, founders of the nation. Even Monroe, the youngest of the five men, and the least distinguished of them, had fought in the Revolutionary War and served in the Continental Congress. But by 1824, that generation had passed. John Quincy Adams had been intended—at least by his father—as their successor, groomed, from childhood, for the presidency. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your successes are mediocre,” John Adams told him. “And if you do not rise . . . to the head of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness, and Obstinancy.”65
John Quincy Adams was hardly a shirker. He’d begun keeping a diary in 1779, when he was twelve and on a diplomatic mission to Europe with his father. After finishing his studies and passing the bar, he’d served as Washington’s minister to the Netherlands and Portugal, as his father’s minister to Prussia, and as Madison’s minister to Russia. He spoke fourteen languages. As secretary of state, he’d drafted the Monroe Doctrine, establishing the principle that the United States would keep out of wars in Europe but would consider any European colonial ventures in the Americas as acts of aggression. By the time he decided to seek the presidency, he’d also served as a U.S. senator and as a professor of logic at Brown and professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.
In 1824, it was said that American voters faced a choice between “John Quincy Adams, / Who can write / And Andrew Jackson, / Who can fight.”66 If the battle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had determined whether aristocracy or republicanism would prevail (and, with Jefferson, republicanism won), the battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams would determine whether republicanism or democracy would prevail (and, with Jackson, democracy would, eventually, win). Jackson’s rise to power marked the birth of American populism. The argument of populism is that the best government is that most closely directed by a popular majority. Populism is an argument about the people, but, at heart, it is an argument about numbers.67
A national hero after the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson had gone on to lead campaigns against the Seminoles, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws, pursuing a mixed strategy of treaty-making and war-making, with far more of the latter than the former, as part of a plan to remove all Indians living in the southeastern United States to lands to the west. He was provincial, and poorly educated. (Later, when Harvard gave Jackson an honorary doctorate, John Quincy Adams refused to attend the ceremony, calling him “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”)68 He had a well-earned reputation for being ferocious, ill-humored, and murderous, on the battlefield and off. When he ran for president, he had served less than a year in the Senate. Of his bid for the White House Jefferson declared, “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”69
Jackson made a devilishly shrewd decision. He would make his lack of certain qualities—judiciousness, education, political experience—into strengths. He would run as a hot-tempered military man who’d pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. To do this, he needed to tell the story of his life. Within weeks of his victory at the Battle of New Orleans, in preparation for a political career, he hired a biographer, sixty-five-year-old David Ramsay, a South Carolina legislator and physician and gifted historian whose books included a two-volume History of the American Revolution (1789) and a heroic Life of George Washington (1807). But before Ramsay could begin work on the biography, he was shot in the back on the streets of Charleston. Jackson hired his aide-de-camp John Reid, who drafted four chapters before he, too, died an unfortunate and unexpected death. “The book must be finished,” Jackson insisted. He turned, next, to a twenty-six-year-old lawyer named John Eaton who had served under Jackson during the Creek War and the War of 1812; Eaton was Jackson’s “bosom friend and adopted son,” according to Margaret Bayard Smith, a novelist and remarkably astute observer of Washington society and politics. (Her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith, was a president of the Bank of the United States.) Eaton’s Life of Andrew Jackson appeared in 1817. The next year, Eaton was elected to the Senate, and in 1823, when Jackson joined him in Washington, the two senators from Tennessee shared lodgings.70
Andrew Jackson, man of the people, was the first presidential candidate to campaign for the office, the first to appear on campaign buttons, and nearly the first to publish a campaign biography. In 1824, when Jackson announced his bid for the presidency, Eaton, who ran Jackson’s campaign, shrewdly revised his Life of Andrew Jackson, deleting or dismissing everything in Jackson’s past that looked bad and lavishing attention on anyth
ing that looked good and turning into strengths what earlier had been considered weaknesses: Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t uneducated; he was self-taught. He wasn’t ill-bred; he was “self-made.”71
The election of 1824 also altered the very method of electing a president. Why should a party’s nominee be selected by a caucus in Congress? The legislative caucus worked only so long as voters didn’t mind that they had virtually no role in electing the president.72 Calls for the beheading of “King Caucus” had begun in 1822, when the New York American asked: “Why should not a general convention of Republican delegates from the different states assemble at Washington a few months prior to the period for electing a President and decide, by a majority, the choice of an individual for that elevated office”? Two years later, popular opposition to the caucus had grown. After word got out to the press about a caucus meeting to be held in the House, only 6 out of 240 legislators were willing to appear before a disgruntled public, which flooded the galleries shouting, “Adjourn! Adjourn!” And so it did.73
With the caucus dead, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Clay simply declared their candidacies. Jackson looked for a popular mandate: he was nominated by the Tennessee legislature. The momentum behind Jackson’s candidacy drew, as well, on the power of newly enfranchised voters. When new states entered the Union, they held conventions to draft and ratify their own state constitutions: they almost always adopted more democratic arrangements than those that prevailed in the thirteen original states. They abolished property requirements for voting, replaced judicial appointment with judicial elections, and provided for the popular election of delegates to the Electoral College. The new and more democratic state constitutions put pressure on older states to revise their own constitutions. By 1821, property qualifications for voting no longer existed in twenty-one out of twenty-four states. Three years later, eighteen out of twenty-four states held popular elections for delegates to the Electoral College. More and poorer white men came to the polls and were elected to office, much to the dismay of conservatives like Chancellor James Kent of New York who, at New York’s 1821 constitutional convention, complained, “The notion that every man that works a day on the road, or serves an idle hour in the militia, is entitled as of right to an equal participation in the whole power of government, is most unreasonable and has no foundation in justice.” He believed in proportionate representation—representation proportionate to wealth: “Society is an association for the protection of property as well as of life, and the individual who contributes only one cent to the common stock, ought not to have the same power and influence in directing the property concerns of the partnership, as he who contributes his thousands.”74