CATCHWORD OF A PARTY
Responding to Taney and Democrats who embraced the Dred Scott decision—among them Stephen Douglas, his famous rival in Illinois—Abraham Lincoln issued one of the most startling challenges in American political history. Addressing Taney’s claim that the founders did not regard blacks as included in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said, “I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the Negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.”
Naming South Carolina Democratic senator John C. Calhoun, Lincoln concedes right away that in the recent past there were prominent Democrats who, finding the Declaration’s insistence that all men are created equal “constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it.” Still, he says, even they did not “pretend to believe it and then assert it did not include the Negro.”
But now, for the first time, Lincoln says, the Democratic Party has produced men like Taney and Douglas who claim that the founders shared an understanding about the Declaration that no living person in their time actually believed. Even more, Lincoln said, their lies about the founders have “become the catchword of the entire party.”11
Lincoln’s claim is just as much a surprise to the modern reader as it must have been to his contemporaries, because modern Democrats, no less than Taney and Douglas, claim the founders were pro-slavery men who had no genuine intent to include blacks in the Declaration of Independence. Yet Lincoln accused Taney of doing “obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language” of the founding documents.12 So how can Lincoln make such a claim about the founding era? What was he getting at?
Lincoln deepens the mystery by repeatedly insisting that as far as slavery is concerned, the entire objective and platform of the Republican Party is merely to restore to America the principled statesmanship of the founders. Lincoln refuses to put any moral distance between him and the founders, between himself, say, and slave-owner and Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson.
This is fascinating and relevant because there are many today who insist that Abraham Lincoln was a liberal and a progressive, that he took on the radical task of correcting the founding and remaking of America. Garry Wills, in Lincoln at Gettysburg, credits Lincoln with a “giant swindle” and “open sleight-of-hand” in altering the meaning of the Constitution to include people the founders had no wish to include.13
Yet Lincoln would undoubtedly decline this praise from a left-wing scholar seeking to appropriate him to the progressive cause. Lincoln viewed himself as a conservative. In a speech in Columbus, Ohio, Lincoln said, “The chief and real purpose of the Republican Party is eminently conservative. It proposes nothing save and except to restore this government to its original tone in regard to this element of slavery, and there to maintain it, looking for no further change . . . than that which the original framers of the Government themselves expected and looked forward to.”
Again, in an 1854 speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln said of slavery, “Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in peace.” He added in his Cooper Union speech, “This is all Republicans ask—all Republicans desire—in relation to slavery . . . For this Republicans contend, and with this, so far as I know or believe, they will be content.”
In Lincoln’s time, some Democrats tried to portray themselves as conservative and Lincoln as the radical. At Cooper Union, he challenged them. “You say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the government . . . but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers.”14
These assertions by Lincoln should be sufficient to refute the progressive propaganda about the Great Emancipator being one of them. But it still raises the question of what Lincoln meant when he insisted that the founders were antislavery men. Lincoln took up this question directly in his Cooper Union address, the speech that, according to historian Harold Holzer, won Lincoln the presidency by convincing the influential Republicans of the Northeast that he was their man.
Let us consider some key items of evidence that Lincoln adduces to show how the framers of the Constitution actually thought and acted with regard to slavery.15 At the Congress of Confederation in 1784, Lincoln noted, four future signers of the Constitution were asked to vote to prohibit slavery in the immense Northwest Territory that would come to include the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Of these, three of the framers voted to ban slavery.
Three years later, a similar Northwest prohibition came up for consideration and two more future framers voted for a ban. Then in 1789, at the first official gathering of Congress, presided by George Washington, all sixteen framers present—Lincoln methodically names each of them—voted unanimously to enforce the slavery ban of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance.
Again in 1804, Lincoln records, two framers were called upon to adjudicate similar restrictions in the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. Again, they voted for federal restrictions, including a ban on future importation of slaves from abroad. And in 1820, when Congress considered the Missouri Compromise, Lincoln points out that two surviving framers cast votes, one to ban slavery extension, one to allow it.
In the manner of a lawyer—which Lincoln was—summing up his case, Lincoln unveils his statistical tally, which he reminds his audience does not include any double counting. He has twenty-three of the thirty-nine framers—“a clear majority,” he points out—voting on the question of slavery expansion, and of these he counts twenty-one, a near unanimity, placing themselves on the side of banning or restricting it.
Finally, in a kind of addendum, Lincoln considers the sixteen framers who left no voting record on the subject, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris. With the exception of one, John Rutledge, Lincoln notes that all the others were confirmed antislavery men. So taking into account how they would likely have voted had the question been before them, Lincoln records his final tally of thirty-six to three, a decisive endorsement by the framers of the Republican position on slavery restriction.
Whatever one thinks of Lincoln’s algebra, he would seem to have decisively refuted Taney’s contention that the founders were unanimous in considering blacks to be so far inferior to whites that they were fit objects only for slavery. Moreover, Lincoln’s challenge to the Democrats to name a single person—not just a single founder but any single individual—of the founding era who claimed blacks were not included as men in the Declaration of Independence was never met by a Democrat of his time and has not been met to this day. Clearly there is something very wrong with the conventional wisdom, both about Lincoln and about the founding era.
JEFFERSON AGONISTES
One of the striking aspects of Lincoln’s demonstration of the founders’ attitudes toward slavery is the role of the Southerners in the group. The South had a dominant role in the founding and several of the early presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—were Southerners. Yet all these men, Virginia slave-owners every one of them, railed against slavery. Their expressed attitude toward it and toward blacks was radically different, as Lincoln noted, from that of the Democrats of his own day.
Even so, the nagging question remains: why did the founders nevertheless elect to permit slavery when presumably they could have banned it outright? If the equality clause of the Declaration articulated, as Lincoln insisted, “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” how can its enforcement be denied or even delayed? To answer this question, let’s begin w
ith the man Lincoln turned to, Thomas Jefferson, whom Lincoln termed “the most distinguished politician of our history,” and examine his views on slavery and white supremacy.16
In doing so we should realize we are considering the hard case, because Jefferson was clearly the most racist of the leading founders. He owned more than 200 slaves and did not free them. He seems to have had his way with a female slave on his plantation, Sally Hemings, and produced children by her. Today’s progressives take a dim view of Jefferson, with some calling for his ouster from America’s canon of revered forefathers.17
By contrast with Jefferson, Washington made provision to free his slaves upon his death and said of 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 owned slaves but devised numerous emancipation schemes, terming slavery “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” Another slave-owner, Hamilton, was nevertheless one of the founders of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. John Jay, America’s first chief justice, was elected president of that society. Neither Adams nor Franklin owned slaves. Adams sought “the eventual total extirpation of slavery,” and Franklin, who termed slavery “an atrocious debasement of human nature,” was elected president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.18
What, then, made Jefferson different from these men? Probably the single greatest difference was that Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and in tune with the latest ideas in science and anthropology. Jefferson was probably the only one among the founders who avidly read ethnological travel accounts of Europeans who penetrated the heart of Africa.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson writes that when it comes to intellectual ability, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites.” Jefferson recognizes, of course, that the condition of blacks in America is largely determined by their enslavement. Still, he says, in ancient societies, slaves, upon becoming free, rose to become eminent figures in philosophy, literature and mathematics. Yet he does not observe this to be true among America’s free blacks, not one of whom, in Jefferson’s experience, has “uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”19
Jefferson never went beyond this “suspicion,” and the suspicion itself was challenged when the black naturalist and mathematician Benjamin Banneker sent Jefferson his writings. Jefferson responded, “Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that Nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”20
Jefferson’s writings about blacks and Native Americans are suffused with anthropological speculation that, in one notable case, seems deeply offensive. Jefferson speaks of black women in Africa having sex with chimpanzees, making reference to “the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species.”21 Here Jefferson seems to echo the most vicious strains of bigotry that degrade blacks to the level of animals.
Where did Jefferson get this? Historian Winthrop Jordan writes, “There was in Africa a beast which was likened to men. It was a strange and eventually tragic happenstance of nature that Africa was the habitat of the animal which in appearance most resembles man. The animal called ‘orang-outang’ by contemporaries (actually the chimpanzee) was native to those parts of western Africa where the early slave trade was heavily concentrated . . . The startlingly human appearance and movements of the . . . orang-outang aroused some curious speculations.” Jordan proceeds to cite travel accounts that speculated about “the sexual association of apes with Negroes.”22
Despite Jefferson’s indulgence in some of the most ridiculous conjectures of Enlightenment naturalism, he flatly refuses to use the supposed primitivism and intellectual inadequacies of blacks to justify their enslavement. “Whatever be their degree of talent,” he writes of blacks in a letter to Henri Gregoire, “it is no measure of their rights.” Jefferson goes on to argue that just “because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”23
Jefferson was, again on account of his Enlightenment sympathies, one of the least religious of the founders. Even so, he thundered against slavery in biblical cadences and with the fury of a biblical prophet. “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” And if the slaves should ever rise up against the masters, Jefferson confesses that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”24
No abolitionist was ever so eloquent. And then, in making the case against British rule in a draft of the Declaration of Independence that Congress amended, Jefferson blames the Crown for introducing and sustaining slavery in America. Jefferson alleges that with regard to blacks, King George “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” Jefferson holds the king responsible for “this execrable commerce” since the Crown was “determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.”25
CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED
At first this foisting of the blame for slavery on the British seems incredible, yet we forget that by the 1770s slavery had already existed in America for 150 years, the first slaves having arrived around 1619 in Virginia. Historian David Brion Davis reminds us that “almost two-thirds of the history of North American slavery occurred before the American Revolution.”26 The founders are often portrayed as instituting slavery in America, whereas in reality they were contending with an institution long established before they contemplated what to do with it.
A few years before the Declaration, Jefferson in A Summary View of the Rights of British America makes this astounding statement against the Crown: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.”27 Abraham Lincoln regarded this statement as of the highest importance. Here is Jefferson basically asserting that most Americans—Southerners no less than Northerners—wish to have slavery ended even while the British Crown insists upon sustaining it against their will. Note that Jefferson does not speak merely of “emancipation”; rather, he uses the term “abolition.” What, one wonders, would Taney have made of this?
In 1779, Jefferson proposed a law that would provide for gradual emancipation of slaves in Virginia, a law that he knew would apply also to him. In 1784, he proposed a law in Congress that would ban slavery from the entire Western territory of the United States; the proposal failed by a single vote. And in 1807 President Jefferson publicly supported the abolition of the slave trade, urging Congress to close it down, which it did.
Why then did Jefferson—and other founders who in general had even stronger antislavery credentials than he did—not act once and for all to end this nefarious institution? Jefferson’s answer cannot be better given than in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Jefferson elaborates on why he considers the emancipation of blacks and their integration into American society not just problematic, but impossible. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, w
ill divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”28
That this is not an affirmation of white supremacy can be seen in Jefferson’s fear that either the whites will exterminate the blacks, or the blacks will exterminate the whites. Jefferson must have considered blacks as a group pretty formidable if he thought they might become the oppressive class.
Even so, Jefferson’s tone here is a bit hysterical; to a progressive, I’m sure he sounds like a modern-day Trumpster, inveighing against illegal immigrants. “They will overrun us. They will wipe us out.” We can agree with the progressive that such fears may be overblown—we can rejoice in hindsight that Jefferson’s ghoulish vision has not come true—but they cannot be dismissed, even if they are irrational. “A universal feeling,” Abraham Lincoln said in precisely this context, “whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded.”29
The reason for this has to do with why people join together in a social compact in the first place. According to John Locke and the theorists of classical liberalism, they do so primarily for security, or what Jefferson calls “self-preservation.” And this security is not merely an actual condition; it is also a perception. In other words, people must not just be secure, they must also feel secure. Their security is in part in the minds of the people themselves, which is why liberal society is based on “the consent of the governed.”
The “consent of the governed” is that other, often overlooked, phrase in the Declaration. Yet it is no less fundamental, of no less importance, than “all men are created equal.” The two would seem to be the twin foundational principles of democracy, yet as the founders and Lincoln all recognized, they are not always compatible. Sometimes they can even become rivals.
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