Sean Wilentz: Garry Wills's Howlers

Sean Wilentz, in a cover story in the New Republic (March 29, 2004), commenting on Garry Wills's new book, "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power:

[Garry Wills's] main argument is the old Federalist canard that the three-fifths clause was the only reason that Thomas Jefferson was elected president and that the Democratic-Republicans won control of Congress. With that control, the Democratic-Republicans, led by slaveholders and with their national interests inextricably bound up with slavery, created legislation to shore up human bondage and to permit its expansion. "On crucial matters," Wills writes, "the federal ratio gave the South a voting majority." That influence lasted long after Jefferson left office--preventing, according to Wills, the exclusion of slavery from Missouri and in the late 1840s dooming the Wilmot Proviso that would have banned slavery in territories won from Mexico . The chief political beneficiaries were Jefferson, his party, and their successors, who were opposed prophetically but unsuccessfully by Federalists like the unsung hero Timothy Pickering.

There are many howlers in this argument. It is hard to know where to begin. The three-fifths clause certainly did not prevent the exclusion of slavery from Missouri in 1819, for the simple reason that the House passed the anti-slavery resolutions proposed by the Republican James Tallmadge, only to have the bill rejected by the Senate, where the three-fifths clause made no difference at all. The same was true of the Wilmot Proviso, which passed the House on numerous occasions. So the House was not as rigged for slavery as Wills thinks. He also confidently reports as an outrageous fact the Federalist claim (which many professional historians have fallen for as well) that the Federalists remained the majority party in 1800 and that except for the three-fifths rule John Adams would have defeated Jefferson. Based on a quick look at the numbers, this would appear to be true. But Wills, like others, slights the Federalists' partisan shenanigans in heavily Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, which led to Adams getting as many as seven more electoral votes, and Jefferson getting seven less, than they respectively deserved. (Jefferson swept Pennsylvania in 1796 and 1804, as did every other Democratic-Republican presidential hopeful through 1816, and in 1800, Democratic-Republicans swept the state's congressional elections.) Without the pro-Adams manipulation, and without the three-fifths rule, Jefferson still would have defeated Adams by anywhere from six to ten electoral votes. Without the three-fifths rule but with the chicanery, the Jeffersonians could have charged that the Federalists had stolen the election, and they would have been correct.

Given the Senate's role in deciding so many vital matters concerning slavery, Wills's preoccupation with the "federal ratio" is badly skewed. Then, as now, each state had equal representation in the Senate, which, unlike now, was elected by the state legislatures and not directly by the voters, making it in many respects the less democratic house of Congress. For most of Jefferson 's presidency, the North enjoyed a majority in the Senate. In 1804, the year Timothy Pickering plotted Yankee secession, the Northern states held an eighteen-to-sixteen edge; in 1812, midway through Madison 's presidency, the balance became equal, but in 1816, after Indiana 's admission as a state, the North regained a two-seat advantage for two of the next three years. Wills is confused: on many "crucial matters," for the entire period under discussion, either the North enjoyed the "vot-ing majority" in the deciding chamber, the Senate, or the chamber was evenly divided. And even so, the Senate repeatedly backed slavery and its expansion.

Wills distorts the early political history of slavery in order to make Jefferson look as bad as possible and his foes look as good as possible. He notes, correctly, that Jefferson cast a cold eye on the Haitian revolutionaries, but he fails to mention that most Federalists, Northerners and Southerners, tried to exploit the revolution by blaming it on the spread of Jefferson 's political principles. He notes, again correctly, that slavery was more of an issue in national debates than some pro-Jefferson historians have been willing to allow, but he gets the politics, and the importance of the three-fifths clause in Congress, almost completely wrong. The approval of the Louisiana Purchase --an essentially pro-slavery move, in Wills's eyes, which is a view that Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams knew better than to endorse--was yet another matter determined by the Senate, not the House. In 1798, a New England Federalist in the House proposed an amendment to ban the spread of slavery into Mississippi Territory, and only two members, both Republicans (including Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's future secretary of the treasury), spoke on the amendment's behalf. In joining the vast House majority against the bill, the Federalist stalwart Harrison Gray Otis, Timothy Pickering's friend and ally, declared haughtily that he "would not interfere with the Southern states as to the species of property in question," and that "he really wished that the gentlemen who held slaves might not be deprived of the means of keeping them in order."

he most important congressional vote about slavery during Jefferson 's presidency, apart from the vote on shutting down the transatlantic slave trade, came in 1804, on the so-called Hillhouse amendments. Proposed by the Federalist James Hillhouse, a senator from Connecticut , the amendments would have banned slavery in Louisiana Territory , but they failed to win passage. Once again, though, the crucial vote involved the Senate, not the House; pace Wills, the three-fifths clause was irrelevant. And the record on the vote is highly revealing. Although Hillhouse was a Federalist, the bulk of his support came from Northern Jeffersonians . The northern Federalists, meanwhile, split right down the middle, with the pro-slavery position getting the backing of, among others, Wills's hero Pickering! (Wills has Pickering voting for the amendment banning slavery, which is another howler.)