Bound for Canaan (6 page)

Jefferson was by no means alone in his prejudices. The eminent Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush, an early and sincere advocate of emancipation, wondered seriously if black skin might be a form of leprosy; once a cure for leprosy had been found, blackness would disappear, he reasoned. The intellectual ferment of the European Enlightenment that gave birth to liberating ideas about human rights also spawned a pseudo-scientific approach to differences among the races that lent the authority of some of the most eminent thinkers to age-old bigotry. “The Negro exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” asserted Friedrich Hegel. “We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.” David Hume, the leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, declared, “There never was a civilized nation of any other com
plexion than white, or even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Even John Locke, who formulated the theory of natural liberty, and who more than any other single individual provided the intellectual underpinnings of the American Revolution, was a staunch defender of slavery, not to mention an investor in the Royal African Company, which enjoyed the British monopoly of the African slave trade. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” Locke wrote that “the child can demonstrate to you that
a negro is not a man
, because white colour was one of the constant simple
ideas
of the complex
idea
he calls
man
: and therefore he can demonstrate, by the principle,
it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be
, that
a negro is not a man
.”

What was remarkable about Jefferson and so many of the best men of his time was not that they held the prejudices they did, but that they managed to rise so far beyond them. Their reading of Locke, Rousseau, and other thinkers taught them that human beings were born with natural rights, which entailed inherent civil rights such as political liberty, freedom of religion, equality before the law, and the right to live one's life as one saw fit. Similarly, if human beings and societies alike were capable of limitless progress, to inhibit it was to commit a crime against Nature, if not against God. Such egalitarian ideas posed a problem for those who would defend slavery: if all men were created equal, how could some hold others in bondage? If all men were born free by law of nature, the Boston radical James Otis argued, “Does it follow that 'tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair like wool instead of Christian hair…help the argument? Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face?” Tom Paine wrote that “every history of the creation” agreed on one point, “
the unity of man
; by which I mean that all men are of
one degree
, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by
creation
rather than
generation
…and consequently, every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God.” Alexander Hamilton, who as an officer during the Revolution saw black troops fight bravely on the battlefield, and knew their abilities, asserted, “Their natural faculties are as good as ours…The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor in experience.”

Americans' discomfort with slavery had a history. From the earliest
days of settlement, at least some colonists had equivocal feelings about slavery. In 1641 Massachusetts forbade slavery in the colony “unless it be lawful Captives taken in just Warres, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us.” By the eighteenth century, Quakers were beginning to argue that spiritual principles required Christians to take a personal stand against slaveholding. But thoughtful men of Jefferson's generation were more directly influenced by the movement toward emancipation in England. In 1772 Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, after determining that there was no law that stipulated that slavery existed in England, declared that slavery was so “odious” that no law could reasonably exist to support it. In effect, this meant that any slave who set foot on English soil became free. In 1787 British abolitionists, with strong support from the evangelicals and Quakers, including the famed potter Josiah Wedgwood, founded the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The committee's most dynamic figure, Thomas Clarkson, memorably declaimed to the House of Commons that “this execrable traffic was as opposite to expediency as it was to the dictates of mercy, of religion, of equity, and of every principle that should actuate the breast.” Even slaveholding Americans shared some of these sentiments. Patrick Henry regarded slavery as an “abominable practice,” and Richard Henry Lee, an ancestor of Robert E. Lee, speaking in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1772, condemned the slave trade as crueler than “the savage barbarity of a Saracen.”

No man had been more consistent in arguing on behalf of individual rights than Jefferson. On the eve of the revolution, he had taken on the case of a mulatto who was suing for his freedom, arguing in a Virginia court that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” And in a section of the Declaration of Independence that was deleted in deference to slave owners, he explicitly attacked the slave trade, asserting that King George III had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into distant slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” His Preamble, however, would be quoted in almost every important manifesto of the abolitionist movement, and cited countless times by
the stationmasters and conductors of the Underground Railroad as an inspiration for the risks they undertook to help fugitive slaves on their way north: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” From now on, as long as slavery lasted, the burden of proof would lie upon slaveholders to show why the blunt declaration that “all men are created equal” did not mean precisely what it said.

In 1784 Jefferson, then a member of the Continental Congress, was appointed to chair a committee charged with drafting a plan for the organization of the newly opened lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, which were destined soon to fill with settlers. Apart from dividing this vast territory into a grid of sixteen new states with fantastical Grecian names like Metropotamia, Pelisipia, and Cheronesus, the measure would have prohibited slavery in all the western territories of the United States, south as well as north. Had Jefferson's plan been adopted, slavery would never have been extended to the present states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, or presumably to those west of the Mississippi. Congress failed to approve the plan by a single vote. “Thus,” Jefferson wrote, “we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.”

Three years later, representatives from every state gathered at Philadelphia to hammer out a plan for a national Constitution. Anxiety about slavery pervaded the convention, causing delegates, in the words of one Georgian, considerable “pain and difficulty.” The resulting compromise pleased no one completely, granting slave states representation for three-fifths of their slave population, even though slaves of course could not vote, and requiring every state to lend assistance in putting down insurrections, and prohibiting any legislation to limit the slave trade for the next twenty years. Even so, many antislavery delegates considered the compromise a victory, naively believing that a stronger federal government would soon be able to exert its power to bring about general emancipation. “Yet the lapse of a few years, and Congress will have power to exterminate slavery from within our borders,” exulted James Wilson of Pennsylvania. A like-minded delegate, William Dawes of Massachusetts,
reported to his state's ratifying convention, “We may say, that although slavery is not smitten by apoplexy, yet it has received a mortal wound, and will die of a consumption.” That same year, the Northwest Ordinance finally laid out a plan for the organization of the western territories, banning slavery north of the Ohio River after 1800, but permitting it in the states to the south. While the Ordinance represented another political compromise, it ensured that much of the West would be free territory forever and that the Ohio would in the dreams of countless slaves become the river Jordan, the threshold of Canaan, and the front line of battle in the moral conflict that would define America for the next three-quarters of a century.

Opposition to slavery among white Americans was, increasingly, not only philosophical but visceral. A Vermont judge named Theophilus Harrington declared in a written opinion that he would accept nothing less than “a bill of sale from God Almighty” as proof of one man's ownership of another. Before the Revolution, such intensely personal reactions were rare. By the last decade of the century, societies advocating emancipation existed in almost every state, North and South, and they attracted the support of many eminent figures. The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was led by Benjamin Franklin, who earlier in life had bought and sold slaves himself. The president of Yale University, Reverend Ezra Stiles, chaired the “Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Holden in Bondage,” which claimed to reflect the sentiments of a large majority of the state's citizens. In New York, prominent men including Alexander Hamilton, Governor George Clinton, Mayor James Duane of New York City, future Chief Justice of the United States John Jay, and many Quakers, met at the Coffee House to organize the New York Manumission Society, naming Jay—who owned five slaves—its president. This was not unusual. In contrast to the abolitionists of a later day, such societies typically included slave owners and promoted only gradual emancipation, in the hopeful belief that masters could be persuaded to peacefully relinquish their human property.

Around the end of the century, a spate of state legislation made it appear that the momentum of history was on the side of emancipation. Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia all prohibited the importing of African slaves, a trend encouraged by those who believed
that ending the transatlantic slave trade was virtually the same as terminating slavery itself. (South Carolina would reverse itself and import thirty-nine thousand more Africans before federal legislation finally put an end to the legal overseas slave trade, in 1808.) By the end of the century, most Northern states had enacted laws mandating gradual emancipation. State legislatures also revised their laws to make it easier for masters to free their slaves. Hundreds did so: between 1790 and 1810, Quaker and Methodist lobbying reduced Pennsylvania's slave population by more than half, from 8,887 to 4,177. In Delaware, the number of free blacks would grow from 30 percent of the state's black population to more than 75 percent between 1790 and 1810, and in Maryland from about 7 percent to more than 23 percent. Many who supported abolition in principle were less committed in actual practice, however. When one of George Washington's slaves fled to New Hampshire, the president wrote to the local authorities asking for his return, gracefully explaining, “However well disposed I might be to gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of people (if the latter was in itself practicable) at this moment it would neither be politic nor just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference, and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow serv'ts, who, by their steady attachment, are far more deserving than herself of favor.” Washington did, however, free his slaves upon his death, in his will, in 1799; Jefferson never did. But to Jefferson and others like him, the end of slavery seemed to be only a matter of time. “The spirit of the master is abating,” he confidently asserted, “that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”

3

The handiwork of a Yankee tinkerer in the summer of 1792 changed everything. Eli Whitney was a genius of a type who would become familiar in the course of the next century, like Robert Fulton, John Deere, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Thomas Edison, who fused
native mechanical aptitude with the entrepreneurial instincts of the dawning industrial age. It was said that as a boy in Massachusetts during the Revolution, Whitney had set up his own small forge and made nails to sell to his neighbors, and then converted them to hairpins after the war. After graduating from Yale, he went south to take a position as a tutor. As a guest in the home of the widow of General Nathaniel Greene, in Georgia, Whitney overheard several of her neighbors discussing the problems of cotton cultivation.

Planters were well aware that a potentially vast market for American cotton was developing in England, where textile manufacture had been revolutionized by the factory system; thanks to new machinery operated by steam or water-powered engines, Britain's cotton imports had more than tripled, from nine million pounds to twenty-eight million pounds, between 1783 and 1790. American planters initially experimented with varieties of cotton imported from the Bahamas, which flourished on islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, but they grew almost nowhere else. This so-called upland or short-staple cotton provided a much greater per-acre yield, but the seeds clung hard to the fiber and had to be pulled out by hand, a labor-intensive job that took one worker a full day to clean a single pound of seeds.