So the notion that the old immigrants had it easy because they could pass for white is wrong. Indeed, the experience of new generations of immigrants—the Chinese, the Pakistanis, the Cubans, the Nigerians—is virtually identical to that of earlier generations of European immigrants. The problems of the newcomers—difficulties with the English language, lack of credit, a feeling of isolation—are precisely the problems that the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews had. True, it is easier to identify a Pakistani than an Italian, but what does this prove? Prejudice and hostility against the European immigrants was vastly greater than anything endured by today’s Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants.
Indigenous minorities, then, are a special case. They, not the immigrants, are the moral and political force behind the multicultural agenda. They are the ones pressing for multicultural education, and racial preferences, and reparations. African-Americans and American Indians are the only groups for whom patriotism is a problem. I do not mean this in an accusatory way; theirs is the natural ambivalence of any people who are deeply convinced that their life in America has been shaped by oppression.
For instance, it is commonplace among American Indians that the white man arrived on these shores with an incorrigible bigotry toward native peoples and then put into effect a policy of exterminating the Indian population. If “America” represents a country that is guilty of unmitigated hatred and genocide, how can the native Indians who were victims of this viciousness and slaughter be expected to salute the flag and sing “God Bless America”? If the white man is guilty as charged, they obviously cannot.
But is the white man guilty as charged? Even on the count of racism against Indians, the evidence is ambiguous. Many whites considered blacks to be racially inferior but they did not feel the same way about American Indians. In this respect Thomas Jefferson is typical: while entertaining doubts that blacks were as intelligent as whites, he confidently stated that any backwardness on the part of the Indian was entirely the result of circumstance.2 True, the white man frequently portrayed the Indian as a “noble savage,” but the accent here is on the word noble. There is a long tradition in the West of admiring the noble savage as harkening from an age of innocence, before the corruptions introduced by civilization.3 It is highly significant that several leading figures during the founding period (Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson) proposed intermarriage between whites and native Indians as a way to integrate the Indians into the mainstream. “What they thought impossible with respect to blacks,” political scientist Ralph Lerner writes, “was seen as highly desirable with respect to Indians.”4
But this is just talk about the white man’s feelings; we also need to discuss the white man’s actions toward the native Indians. Aren’t the European settlers guilty of genocide? As a matter of fact, they are not. Millions of Indians perished as a result of contact with the white man, but for the most part they died by contracting his diseases: smallpox, measles, malaria, tuberculosis. There are isolated instances of European military commanders attempting to vanquish hostile Indian tribes by giving them smallpox-infected blankets. But as William McNeill documents in Plagues and Peoples, the white man generally transmitted his diseases to the Indians without knowing it, and the Indians died in large numbers because they had not developed immunities to those diseases. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not genocide, because genocide implies an intention to wipe out an entire population. McNeill points out that, a few centuries earlier, Europeans themselves contracted lethal diseases, including the bubonic plague, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn’t have immunities, and the plague decimated one-third of the population of Europe.5 Despite the magnitude of deaths and suffering, no one calls this genocide, and they are right not to do so.
None of this is to excuse the settlers’ injustices, or to diminish the historical misfortune of the American Indians. In his famous “Essay on the Three Races,” Tocqueville contrasts the situation of the native Indian with that of blacks. Tocqueville’s essay makes revealing reading because we are taught by multicultural educators to regard the circumstances of blacks and native Indians as very similar: both suffered miserably at the hands of the white man. But Tocqueville captures a nuance that has eluded our present-day ideologues. The Indian, he writes, never wanted Western civilization, but the white man was determined to shove it down his throat. In short, the Indian is faced with the problem of forced inclusion. Blacks, Tocqueville said, want nothing more than to share the privileges of white society, but whites will not allow them to do so. In short, blacks are faced with the problem of forced exclusion.
The charge of forced exclusion is the more serious one, and in this chapter I focus on African-Americans. Most blacks believe that they have suffered, and continue to suffer, terrible injustice at the hands of the white man. The great black scholar W. E. B. DuBois said his life in America was defined by a kind of double consciousness, resulting in a divided loyalty. DuBois wrote, “One ever feels this two-ness: an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”6
The problem of patriotism for black Americans was even more dramatically stated in the late nineteenth century by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “This fourth of July,” he said, “is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man. I have not—I cannot have—any love for this country, as such, or for its constitution. I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible.”7 Douglass’s statement borders on treason, yet it is an honorable treason. His argument is one that Aristotle would recognize. What he is saying is that one cannot be a good citizen in a bad country.
The United States military is disproportionately made up of black Americans. These men and women are apparently ready and willing to fight for their country, but it is not unreasonable to wonder why. If Douglass is right, this is not their country, it has not treated them well, it continues to treat them badly, so they are at best (as the popular T-shirt has it) “Africans in America.” To speak in the language of Malcolm X, are blacks in the armed forces nothing more than “house Negroes” foolishly risking their lives to protect the master’s plantation? This seems a very harsh assessment, but it is undoubtedly true that there is very little in the black literary tradition, and very little said by contemporary black leaders, that makes the case for why black Americans should love America and fight for America. Why, then, should they?
Leading black scholars such as John Hope Franklin say that the problems of African-Americans go back to the beginning—to the American founding. Franklin argues that the founders “betrayed the ideals to which they gave lip service.” They wrote “eloquently at one moment for the brotherhood of man and in the next moment denied it to their black brothers.” They chose to “degrade the human spirit by equating five black men with three white men.” The consequences have been unremittingly painful for African-Americans. “Having created a tragically flawed revolutionary doctrine and a Constitution that did not bestow the blessings of liberty on its posterity, the founding fathers set the stage for every succeeding generation to apologize, compromise, and temporize on those principles of liberty that were supposed to be the very foundation of our system of government and way of life.”8
Such views have become commonplace among African-Americans, and they are routinely promulgated in multicultural textbooks. Interestingly Franklin’s criticism of the founders relies on the same reasoning that Justice Taney relied on in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Writing for the majority in this notorious 1857 case upholding slavery, Taney argued that since several of the founders, including Jefferson, were slave owners, th
ese men could not have really meant that “all men are created equal.” They may have written “all men,” but what they really meant was “white men.” As for black slaves, Taney concluded that they have “no rights that the white man is bound to respect.”9
Are Franklin and Taney right? Are the founders guilty as alleged? Let us consider the evidence fairly, beginning with the notorious “three-fifths” clause to which Franklin alludes. To the modern mind, this is one of the most troubling pieces of evidence against the founders. And yet it should not be, because the clause itself has nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of blacks.
The origins of the clause are to be found in the debate between the northern states and the southern states over the issue of political representation. The South wanted to count blacks as whole persons, in order to increase its political power. The North wanted blacks to count for nothing—not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the antislavery majority in Congress. It was not a proslavery southerner but an antislavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. The effect was to limit the South’s political representation and its ability to protect the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass understood this: he called the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” which deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”10 So a provision of the Constitution that was antislavery and pro-black in intent as well as in effect is today cited to prove that the American founders championed the cause of racist oppression.
Refuting the myth that the three-fifths clause degrades black humanity does not absolve the founders of the charge of hypocrisy. We still have to meet Franklin and Taney’s argument that the founders claimed to be antislavery while approving a Constitution that permitted the continuation of slavery. Despite Jefferson’s impressive fulminations against slavery, the fact remains that he owned some two hundred slaves and did not free them. Does it not follow that the author of “all men are created equal” could not have meant what he said?
It should not be surprising that Jefferson, a Virginia planter, owned slaves; in this he was a man of his time. What is surprising is that, as a southern slave owner, Jefferson made no attempt to justify slavery by contending that it was good for the slave. On the contrary, he repeatedly denounced slavery in the strongest terms. Even if blacks could be shown to be intellectually inferior to whites, Jefferson denied that this would provide a just basis for their enslavement. “Whatever be their talents, it is no measure of their rights.”11 Jefferson was one of the least religious of the founders, but strikingly he consistently adopted prophetic biblical language in condemning slavery. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”12
Given Jefferson’s firm repudiation of slavery, a view shared by most of the framers, why didn’t these men move rapidly to free their slaves and insist upon a Constitution that would immediately secure equal rights for all? To answer this question, we must understand something about the relationship between slavery and democracy, and about the practical dilemma faced by the framers in Philadelphia.
For millennia, slavery was an accepted part of society. In numerous civilizations both Western and non-Western, slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics. The major religions of the world, including Christianity and Islam, permitted slavery. True, Christianity and Islam both hold that all persons are equal in God’s sight. But for centuries this was considered a spiritual truth, inapplicable to the hierarchies of this world. But starting in the seventeenth century, certain segments of Christianity—initially the Quakers, then the evangelical Christians—began to interpret biblical equality as forbidding the ownership of one man by another. Only then, for the first time, did slavery become a political problem.13
Before that, slaves were typically captured in warfare or bought and sold in slave markets, and the greatest thinkers of antiquity condoned slavery. Aristotle distinguished between those who were “slaves by nature,” i.e., those who lacked the mental capacity to rule themselves, and “slaves by convention,” i.e., those who had the misfortune to be captured and enslaved. While Aristotle did not attempt to defend conventional slavery in terms of justice, he did allow it on grounds of expediency. In every society, he said, there is dirty work to be done, and someone has to do it. If slaves do the hard labor, Aristotle theorized, then there would be leisure for others to engage in higher pursuits like art and philosophy and politics.
In his debate with Abraham Lincoln in the mid–nineteenth century, Stephen Douglas offered a version of the Aristotelian argument in defense of the slave system of the American South. “The civilized world has always held that when any race of men have shown themselves to be so degraded by ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and barbarism, as to be utterly incapable of governing themselves, they must, in the nature of things, be governed by others, by such laws as are deemed to be applicable to their condition.”14 The careful reader will also recognize in this statement echoes of Plato’s argument for why the wise should rule.
We might regard Stephen Douglas’s argument to be crude and despicable, but Abraham Lincoln did not. He agreed with Douglas: it is absurd to construct a regime in which the foolish are in charge. Thus democracy poses a problem that the American founders and Lincoln all recognized: how can the wise—who are by definition the few—be reliably identified and chosen to rule by the many? Representative government is based on the hope that the majority will exercise their power on behalf of right—that they will choose others to govern who are wiser than themselves. Yet modern democracy introduces a crucial qualification to the claim of the wise to rule: such rule is only legitimate when it is vindicated by popular consent. The requirement of consent is necessary to ensure that the wise do not rule simply for their own benefit, but also for the benefit of the unwise.
“The only distinction between freedom and slavery,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “consists in this: in the former state, a man is governed by laws to which he has given his consent; in the latter, he is governed by the will of another.”15 Here we can see what the American founders saw instantly: that the argument for democracy and the argument against slavery are one and the same. Both are based on the political doctrine that no man may rule another man without his consent.
Since blacks are human beings, slavery is against natural right and should be prohibited. But how? Here is where Jefferson and the founders faced two profound obstacles. The first was that virtually all of them recognized the degraded condition of blacks in America and understood it posed a formidable hurdle to granting blacks the rights of citizenship. By contrast with monarchy and aristocracy, which only require subjects to obey, self-government requires citizens who have the capacity to be rulers. Jefferson and the founders were legitimately concerned that a group that had been enslaved for centuries was not ready to assume the responsibility of democratic self-rule.
Jefferson was also aware of the existence of intense and widespread white prejudices against blacks which, whatever their cause, seemed to prevent the two peoples from coexisting harmoniously on the same soil. Madison, who shared this view, developed a plan for the U.S. government to raise money to repatriate blacks to Africa. These so-called colonization schemes seem bizarre today, but in the eighteenth century they were supported by many abolitionists, white as well as black. Lincoln himself echoed Jefferson’s concerns, and prior to the Civil War he endorsed colonization as a way for blacks to live free and unmolested in a country of their own.
The deference of Jefferson and the American founders to popular prejudices strikes many contemporary scholars as an intellectual and moral scandal. Some, like John Hope Franklin, suggest that popular convictions simply represented a frustrating obstacle that the founders should have dealt with resolutely and uncompromisingly. But in a democratic society, the absence of the people’s agreement on a fundamental question of governance i
s no mere technicality. The case for democracy, no less than the case against slavery, rests on the legitimacy of the people’s consent. To outlaw slavery without the consent of the majority of whites would be to destroy democracy, indeed to destroy the very basis for outlawing slavery itself.
The men gathered in Philadelphia were in a peculiar predicament. For them to sanction slavery would be to proclaim the illegitimacy of the American revolution and the new form of government based on the people’s consent; yet for them to outlaw slavery without securing the people’s consent would have the same effect. In practical terms as well, the choice facing the founders was not to permit or to prohibit slavery. Rather, the choice was either to establish a union in which slavery was tolerated, or not to have a union at all. Any suggestion that the southern states could have been persuaded to join a union and give up slavery can be dismissed as preposterous. As Harry Jaffa puts it, had the founders insisted upon securing all the rights of all men, they would have ended up securing no rights for anybody.16
Thus the accusation that the founders compromised on the Declaration’s principle that “all men are created equal” for the purpose of expediency reflects a grave misunderstanding. The founders were confronted with a competing principle that is also present in the Declaration: governments derive their legitimacy from the “consent of the governed.” Both principles must be satisfied, and when they cannot be, compromise is not merely permissible but morally required.
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