Five reasons why the founding fathers could have killed slavery
For generations, white historians have taken for granted that it would not have been possible to abolish slavery during the revolutionary era. In 1976, as the nation was celebrating the bicentennial of the American Revolution, it was commonplace to commend the founding fathers for not attempting to end slavery, a step regarded as hopelessly idealistic if not fanatical. Why fanatical? Partly, it is argued, because "only gradually were [white] men coming to see that [slavery] was a peculiarly degrading and a uniquely brutalizing institution" -- a "dawning awareness" that only crept up on the revolutionary generation. Research in recent years about the roots and extent of abolitionist thought, led by David Brion Davis, has demolished this notion that it was beyond the cognitive reach of the founders to imagine that they could eliminate slavery. We now understand that abolitionist sentiment was widespread, though of course unevenly, throughout the new nation. David Waldstreicher, in a recent survey of the literature, concludes that "a consensus existed in many, perhaps most parts of the country, that slavery was inconsistent with American revolutionary principles and ought to be consigned to the dustbin of history."
But the main reason offered for calling anti-slavery efforts "fanatical" is the argument that any attempt to prohibit slavery would have shattered the newly formed union of states that had won independence from Great Britain. The intransigence of Georgia and South Carolina would have guaranteed that -- or so the argument goes. In such a situation, idealism had to be tempered with pragmatism, with pragmatism trumping idealism in any showdown. Thus, even if ending slavery had emerged as a key element of a revolutionary reform agenda, a campaign on its behalf could not have surmounted the threat of disunion.
The argument that slavery could not have been abolished reeks of the dangerous, indeed odious, concept of historical inevitability, almost always in historical writing a concept advanced by those eager to excuse mistakes and virtually never by those writing on behalf of victims of the mistakes. The idea of historical inevitability is a winner's weapon, as old as the tales told by ancient conquerors. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin puts it cogently: "The behavior of men is . . . made what it is by factors largely beyond the control of individuals . . . Our sense of guilt and of sin, our pangs of remorse and self-condemnation, are automatically dissolved; the tension, the fear of failure and frustration disappear as we become aware of the elements of a larger 'organic whole,' of which we are variously described as limbs or elements . . . Viewed in this new light [our historical actions] turn out no longer wicked but right and good because necessitated."
It is time to reconsider the entire matter. The proper starting point is a brief review of five interlocking factors in the 1780s and early 1790s that made the immediate post-revolutionary period an opportune time for abolishing slavery. First, it was the era when the sentiment for ridding American society of a blood-drenched labor system widely agreed to be an insult to the Revolution's sponsorship of universal rights was at its peak. Beginning with Pennsylvania, Vermont and Massachusetts, northern state legislatures and supreme courts were outlawing slavery -- gradually, to be sure, but with moral certitude. As for Maryland and Virginia, the region with the greatest number of slaves, Jefferson believed that "from the mouth to the head of the Chesapeake, the bulk of the people will approve of [extirpating slavery] in theory, and it will find a respectable minority ready to adopt it in practice, a minority which for weight and worth of character preponderates against the great number, who have not the courage to divest their families of a property which however keeps their consciences unquiet." North Carolina, in 1790, insisted that slavery be banned from the western lands it was ceding to the national government. In both North and South, religious leaders, particularly those of the fast-growing Baptists and Methodists, were speaking forthrightly about the necessity of cleansing the country of a national sin. Larry Tise, in a survey of proslavery thought, found that from 1775 to the early 19th century almost no Southern leader defended slavery.
Second, this was the moment when the part of the new nation most resistant to abolition, the Lower South, was also composed of the two states most precariously situated and ill-prepared to break away from the rest of the nation. Third, it was a period when the system of thought called cultural environmentalism was in full sway. Nobody contested the deplorable state of enslaved Africans, but their pitiable condition, according to environmentalist thought, was caused not by nature -- biological inferiority -- but by lack of nurture, a systematic denial of uplifting education or opportunities to improve themselves, along with brutal treatment that extinguished sparks of genius. No inborn disability, argued the environmentalists, stood in the way of emancipation, which, when accomplished, would allow the flowering of black talent and responsible behavior.
Fourth, the opening of the trans-Appalachian West after England surrendered its claims to this vast territory provided the wherewithal for a compensated emancipation. This would have been expensive, but even as early as 1775 a Connecticut clergyman had shown in great detail how that state could use its western lands to indemnify all its slave owners at a relatively modest cost....
Lastly, the outbreak of black rebellion in Saint Domingue in 1791 and the thunderclap decision of the French Revolutionary government in February 1794 to emancipate half a million slaves, along with the almost simultaneous passage of a bill in England's House of Commons to abolish the English slave trade, led to a crescendo of anti-slavery radicalism by the mid-1790s. As Washington started his second term as president, the belief spread that the entire western world was poised to reverse the sordid three-century descent into European-sponsored enslavement of Africans. In the view of many, the time seemed at hand, as the poet-journalist Philip Freneau expressed it, when "philosophy and religion shall deliver a suffering race from those evils; and when the gradual progress of reason will unite nation with nation, and colour with colour, blending the rights of man with the expectations of policy and commerce."
Let us now turn to the argument central to the defense of the revolutionary generation's failure to abolish slavery -- that the nation's frailty would not permit such a fundamental change. No one doubts that the confederation of 13 American states was imperfectly knit together; indeed, for this reason the Americans barely won the war of independence, and only, as it happened, with massive French and Dutch aid. But how could the union of states be strengthened? Pondering the tenuousness of the post-revolutionary confederation of states, historians have seldom considered that a national plan for abolishing slavery might have been an integrative rather than a divisive mechanism. Is it a counterfactual flight of fantasy that ending slavery might have helped create a genuinely national society out of semi-separate, fractious regions? Is it not possible that this could have bolstered union by eliminating a rankling sore in the body politic and completing a reform without which postwar American society could never be ideologically true to itself? Is it not true that any society where people's behavior aligns with their principles is stronger than one in which practice and principles are at odds?...
But the main reason offered for calling anti-slavery efforts "fanatical" is the argument that any attempt to prohibit slavery would have shattered the newly formed union of states that had won independence from Great Britain. The intransigence of Georgia and South Carolina would have guaranteed that -- or so the argument goes. In such a situation, idealism had to be tempered with pragmatism, with pragmatism trumping idealism in any showdown. Thus, even if ending slavery had emerged as a key element of a revolutionary reform agenda, a campaign on its behalf could not have surmounted the threat of disunion.
The argument that slavery could not have been abolished reeks of the dangerous, indeed odious, concept of historical inevitability, almost always in historical writing a concept advanced by those eager to excuse mistakes and virtually never by those writing on behalf of victims of the mistakes. The idea of historical inevitability is a winner's weapon, as old as the tales told by ancient conquerors. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin puts it cogently: "The behavior of men is . . . made what it is by factors largely beyond the control of individuals . . . Our sense of guilt and of sin, our pangs of remorse and self-condemnation, are automatically dissolved; the tension, the fear of failure and frustration disappear as we become aware of the elements of a larger 'organic whole,' of which we are variously described as limbs or elements . . . Viewed in this new light [our historical actions] turn out no longer wicked but right and good because necessitated."
It is time to reconsider the entire matter. The proper starting point is a brief review of five interlocking factors in the 1780s and early 1790s that made the immediate post-revolutionary period an opportune time for abolishing slavery. First, it was the era when the sentiment for ridding American society of a blood-drenched labor system widely agreed to be an insult to the Revolution's sponsorship of universal rights was at its peak. Beginning with Pennsylvania, Vermont and Massachusetts, northern state legislatures and supreme courts were outlawing slavery -- gradually, to be sure, but with moral certitude. As for Maryland and Virginia, the region with the greatest number of slaves, Jefferson believed that "from the mouth to the head of the Chesapeake, the bulk of the people will approve of [extirpating slavery] in theory, and it will find a respectable minority ready to adopt it in practice, a minority which for weight and worth of character preponderates against the great number, who have not the courage to divest their families of a property which however keeps their consciences unquiet." North Carolina, in 1790, insisted that slavery be banned from the western lands it was ceding to the national government. In both North and South, religious leaders, particularly those of the fast-growing Baptists and Methodists, were speaking forthrightly about the necessity of cleansing the country of a national sin. Larry Tise, in a survey of proslavery thought, found that from 1775 to the early 19th century almost no Southern leader defended slavery.
Second, this was the moment when the part of the new nation most resistant to abolition, the Lower South, was also composed of the two states most precariously situated and ill-prepared to break away from the rest of the nation. Third, it was a period when the system of thought called cultural environmentalism was in full sway. Nobody contested the deplorable state of enslaved Africans, but their pitiable condition, according to environmentalist thought, was caused not by nature -- biological inferiority -- but by lack of nurture, a systematic denial of uplifting education or opportunities to improve themselves, along with brutal treatment that extinguished sparks of genius. No inborn disability, argued the environmentalists, stood in the way of emancipation, which, when accomplished, would allow the flowering of black talent and responsible behavior.
Fourth, the opening of the trans-Appalachian West after England surrendered its claims to this vast territory provided the wherewithal for a compensated emancipation. This would have been expensive, but even as early as 1775 a Connecticut clergyman had shown in great detail how that state could use its western lands to indemnify all its slave owners at a relatively modest cost....
Lastly, the outbreak of black rebellion in Saint Domingue in 1791 and the thunderclap decision of the French Revolutionary government in February 1794 to emancipate half a million slaves, along with the almost simultaneous passage of a bill in England's House of Commons to abolish the English slave trade, led to a crescendo of anti-slavery radicalism by the mid-1790s. As Washington started his second term as president, the belief spread that the entire western world was poised to reverse the sordid three-century descent into European-sponsored enslavement of Africans. In the view of many, the time seemed at hand, as the poet-journalist Philip Freneau expressed it, when "philosophy and religion shall deliver a suffering race from those evils; and when the gradual progress of reason will unite nation with nation, and colour with colour, blending the rights of man with the expectations of policy and commerce."
Let us now turn to the argument central to the defense of the revolutionary generation's failure to abolish slavery -- that the nation's frailty would not permit such a fundamental change. No one doubts that the confederation of 13 American states was imperfectly knit together; indeed, for this reason the Americans barely won the war of independence, and only, as it happened, with massive French and Dutch aid. But how could the union of states be strengthened? Pondering the tenuousness of the post-revolutionary confederation of states, historians have seldom considered that a national plan for abolishing slavery might have been an integrative rather than a divisive mechanism. Is it a counterfactual flight of fantasy that ending slavery might have helped create a genuinely national society out of semi-separate, fractious regions? Is it not possible that this could have bolstered union by eliminating a rankling sore in the body politic and completing a reform without which postwar American society could never be ideologically true to itself? Is it not true that any society where people's behavior aligns with their principles is stronger than one in which practice and principles are at odds?...