The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  While clearly condemning the “execrable commerce,” it is notable that Jefferson never explicitly calls for the complete and immediate abolition of slavery. In fact, he raises the button-pushing issue of slave revolts (“exciting those very people to rise up in arms”) in order to mobilize wider support for the Declaration. White fear of slave rebellions was widespread in the colonies. It was rooted in the very real experiences of black uprisings and plots dating back to at least 1663 in Gloucester County, Virginia, where a group of black slaves and white servants was caught planning to achieve their freedom by overthrowing their masters. Scores of plots to revolt were organized in the colonies—including New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey—in the period prior to the Revolutionary war.44 In American Negro Slave Revolts, Herbert Aptheker describes these revolts in detail, noting that fear of black rebellion was widespread among white enslavers and often spiked into collective panic. An early example of this occurred in South Carolina when it was discovered that fugitive slaves were actively aiding the Yamasee and Lower Creek Indians in their forays against whites in 1727 and 1728.45 Examples would multiply in the 1800s.

  From the onset of slavery, rebellion was common and persistent. Blacks resisted being captured, resisted being transported, and resisted being enslaved. The history of slavery is the history of blacks rebelling against the violent nightmare white enslavers imposed upon them. “The first settlement within the present borders of the United States to contain Negro slaves,” writes Aptheker, “was the locale of the first slave revolt.”46 Even prior to the establishment of the thirteen British colonies, in 1526 there was a slave insurrection on what is now the coast of South Carolina in a colony controlled by the Spanish.47 The settlement consisted of approximately 600 people—500 Spanish and 100 black slaves. When disease ravaged the settlement, several slaves rebelled and fled to shelter with the nearby Indians. The 150 European settlers who survived illness abandoned their settlement for Haiti, leaving the “rebel Negroes with their Indian friends—as the first permanent inhabitants, other than Indians, in what was to be the United States.”48

  In truth, slaves in America did not need external incitement from England or indigenous communities to rise up and strike for freedom. It was the homegrown horrors and atrocities of the U.S. slave system that generated hundreds of slave rebellions from the beginning of slavery to its very final moment.

  In any case, the Declaration of Independence, unlike other documents from the revolutionary period, neither expressly sanctioned slavery nor clearly supported its abolition. A generous interpretation is that while permitting whites to continue to enslave blacks, it also foresaw and implied a slavery-free future. Drafted by the individual who would become the nation’s third president, it set the template for the long trail of compromise, contradiction, and domination against which generations of blacks would have to struggle in order to achieve the same rights as the country’s white founders.

  The symbolic power of the Declaration relative to the presidency is perhaps nowhere more poignantly manifest than in the fact that three of the first five presidents died on the Fourth of July—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the document in 1826 and James Monroe five years later in 1831.49 But from the historical perspective of blacks alive at that time until slavery’s end, the Declaration symbolized the gross inequality of the new nation. Reflecting on the Declaration seventy-six years later, a time when slavery had still not been abolished, Frederick Douglass said, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”50 And to the slaveocracy, writes Aptheker, “the Declaration of Independence became but the mouthings of an irresponsible and dangerous fanatic, a ridiculous and high-sounding concoction of obvious absurdities.”51

  The Articles of Confederation

  I abhor slavery.—Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress in 1777, during the debate and passage of the Articles of Confederation.52

  The first effort to create a governing document that would unite the new states culminated in the Articles of Confederation. Written while Continental Congress members were trying desperately to avoid capture by the British, the document failed to establish the authority needed to administer a functional central government. Its weaknesses would ultimately lead to its demise, but its significance for our discussion is that it continued the pro-slavery tilt that had characterized the debates surrounding the Declaration of Independence. Not only did the Articles of Confederation sanction slavery, but they repudiated the Somerset decision and foreshadowed the Fugitive Slave Laws and Article 4, Section 2, of the Constitution, stipulating that the federal government had to provide for the return of blacks who had escaped from their owners.

  Congress selected a slaveholding lawyer from Pennsylvania, John Dickinson, to draft the Articles. Only a week after the Declaration of Independence was issued, the rebel Congress began to debate Dickinson’s draft. Dickinson conceived of a strong central government that would exercise a great deal of authority over the states. Southern leaders reacted immediately and negatively. They believed that any document that did not clearly allow for states to continue the institution of slavery was a threat to their future. North Carolina’s Thomas Burke argued for a clause stating “that in all things else each state would exercise all the rights and powers of sovereignty, uncontrolled.”53

  The debate over the Articles lasted for more than a year. In November 1777, the Congress finally adopted a revised version, which it then sent to the states for ratification. The Southerners perpetuated slavery through two components in the Articles: First, through Article II: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled;” and second, through the inclusion of a rule that the Articles could only be amended by unanimous approval by all the states.

  While the Articles, up to this point, sheltered the institution of slavery, the document did not address an equally important concern of slaveholders: the phenomenon of slaves freeing themselves by escaping to states where slavery was abolished or only meekly enforced. The Somerset nightmare, by which England potentially would free any slave that entered into it, loomed large. This concern was addressed in Article IV, which read as follows:

  The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States . . . and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them.

  In a pattern that would repeat itself for centuries, the South argued vigorously for state sovereignty, with particular interest in preventing other states from manifesting their opposition to white Southerners’ racial practices. Thus the debate was never purely a philosophical one of states’ rights vs. a strong central authority, but rather an ideological one of support or opposition to a particular type and structure of government that legitimated and enforced chattel slavery. In the final version of the Articles, there was no executive branch and no national judiciary, but a continuing concession to the South as its price for participation in the new nation.

  “All Other Persons:” The U.S. Constitution and Racial Justice

  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, th
ey were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.54—Martin Luther King Jr.

  [I]n the United States the slave was a shackled counterbalance to the personal freedoms that defined America. He was written into the Constitution as three-fifths of a man.55—Wynton Marsalis

  When the Founding Fathers said, ‘We the People,’ they did not mean us. Our ancestors were considered three-fifths of a person.56—Condoleezza Rice

  Worried that the Articles of Confederation were proving inadequate to the task of unifying the new nation, in 1787 James Madison and other reformers called together a Constitutional Convention to amend the Articles. Instead, the fifty-five white men who gathered ended up replacing the Articles with the document that has served as the fundamental instrument defining U.S. federalism, its branches of government, its principles, and the relationship between the federal government and the states.

  Under the Articles, the thirteen states functioned as independent entities with only a modicum of authority and respect vested in a central government. Inefficiency and dysfunctionality had led to a growing number of uprisings and class conflicts, most notably Shays’ Rebellion—an armed uprising of Revolutionary War veterans, indebted farmers and others who rebelled against high taxes (“rates”), foreclosures, and their loss of their land and livestock. The rebellion started in western Massachusetts on August 29, 1786, and began to spread throughout the state. After months of escalating confrontation, the revolt was finally suppressed in early 1787 by an army funded by a group of men from Boston. In the end, more than 1,000 people were arrested, some of whom were later executed.57 Shays’ Rebellion sent a powerful message to the wealthy that a stronger national government was needed to hold the country together and protect their interests.58

  The U.S. Constitution put meat on the skeleton of America’s infant democracy. It identified and clarified the responsibilities of the different branches of government and their relationship to the states. It made concrete the principles of balance of power and separation of power, both necessary for a system of checks and balances. It (eventually) spelled out a set of rights that few other nations in the world at that time had even considered. It advocated the rule of law and a justice system that would be fair and transparent. It expressed itself as a social contract between the governing and the governed, a principle that would mark democracies in the centuries that would follow. More than any other document, it sought to proclaim to the United States and the world that a genuine new nation was being born in which they would govern themselves by truly democratic principles.

  Unfortunately, as with the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution blatantly neglected to erase the scar of racism from the face of American democracy. Written by wealthy white men, the new Constitution guaranteed them rights it denied to women, enslaved people, and the country’s original inhabitants, the indigenous communities. The language of ambiguity would once again triumph as concessions to slaveholders won the day in three key sections of the Constitution. The document reduced blacks, for the purpose of allocating congressional representation, to less than full personhood (Article 1, Section 2); sanctioned the slave trade for another twenty years (Article 1, Section 9); and nationalized slavery with the fugitive slave provision (Article 4, Section 2)—all without once mentioning the words “slave” or “slavery.” As the critic Luther Martin noted at the time, “They anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expressions which might be odious in the ears of Americans, although they were willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified.”59 Beyond the well-known sections mentioned above, in at least six other sections of the Constitution slavery is protected or referenced. In two other sections, Article 1, Section 8 and Article 4, Section 4, the Constitution asserts the responsibility of the federal government to assist the states in the suppression of “insurrections” and “domestic violence.” While these clauses could be interpreted to address class-based uprisings such as that led by Shays and others in Massachusetts only months before the Constitutional Convention, the framers clearly had race-based slave revolts in mind, if not as the central focus. Article 1, Section 2, and Article 1, Section 9, also referred to the apportionment of taxes that took into account the enslaved population. Finally, Article 5 states that Article 1, Section 9, Clauses 1 and 4, referring to the slave trade and direct taxes respectively, were made unamendable.60

  As Richard Beeman states in Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, his brilliant treatise tracing the debates and arguments that ultimately produced the Constitution, “There are no moral heroes to be found in the story of slavery and the making of the American Constitution.”61 In the compromise reached over the issue of allocation of representation in Congress, the Convention delegates agreed that each state would have an equal number of Senators—two—in the U.S. Senate and would have proportional representation in the U.S. House of Representatives based on each state’s population. Southern states, for obvious reasons, wanted to include those held in slavery as part of their population figure. Northern states strenuously objected, principally to protect their own power, not to challenge the dehumanized status of those enslaved. Northerners contended that, given that blacks were property, the Southerners might as well include their cows and horses. The debate was vigorous and lasted for days. The compromised reached by the Convention, perhaps unique in the history of such events, was cloaked in evasive language. Article 1, Section 2.3, stated:

  Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may include within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.

  The phrase “all other persons” referenced the nearly 700,000 blacks who were held in slavery throughout the country. While the section did not exclude “free” blacks from being counted as whole persons, the objective of racial exclusion was unambiguous. Madison, one of the mediators of the debate, argued defensively in Federalist Paper No. 54 that Southern states would be constrained by the dual pressure of wanting high numbers for representation purposes and low numbers for tax purposes.62 He missed the obvious fact that the increased number of representatives gained by the South as a result of the clause would affect decisions on tax policies in ways beneficial to the South.

  The impact of this clause was multiple. In the first sense, it perpetuated the disenfranchisement of about 20 percent of the people who resided, worked, died, prayed, and lived in the thirteen colonies at the time. Enslaved blacks and non-taxed Indians—as well as the entire female population and non-property-owning white males—had no electoral or formal political voice in the birthing process of the nation, though all contributed greatly to the revolutionary cause.

  Additionally, the three-fifths clause distorted the development of the political system at the national level for decades. The South benefited substantially from this compromise (see Table 1), which resulted in a disproportionately higher number of Southerners in the U.S. House of Representatives. Four states in the North—Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont—where the free black population was larger than the enslaved one, gained little. On the other hand, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia reaped substantial advantage. Since many politicians used their experience serving in the U.S. House of Representatives to go on to become senators, it meant a disparate impact on the U.S. Senate, the chamber that confirms Supreme Court nominees and cabinet positions. Every nomination to and decision by the U.S. Supreme Court prior to the Civil War Court has to be seen in light of this context. Finally, up until the Civil War, the three-fifths clause also allowed for the South to accumulate a greater number of Electoral Co
llege votes, a factor in determining who would win control of the White House. Half of the first sixteen presidents came from the South, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.

  The Constitution also guaranteed that the supply of enslaved individuals would continue after the Revolution. Article 1, Section 9, states:

  The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

  Table 1

  The South Benefits from the Three-Fifths Clause, 1790 U.S. Census

  *States whose free blacks outnumbered those who were enslaved. Source: U.S. Census.

  Parsing the language in the Constitution is crucial. Article 1, Section 9, states that Congress shall not prohibit the slave trade prior to 1808, but it does not mandate the abolition of slavery on or after that date. Instead of prohibiting human trafficking, breeding, and ownership, the Article’s language in fact gave Southern whites the assurance that there would be nothing in the Constitution to prevent them from perpetuating these practices after 1808.