Founding Brothers (13 page)

Elbridge
Gerry of Massachusetts attempted to offer conciliatory words to his southern
colleagues, though he did so in a decidedly northern accent. His rambling
remarks described the predicament of slave owners as truly tragic and not of
their own making. They had been “betrayed into the slave-trade by the
first settlers.” But rather than countenance their unfortunate condition,
the chief task of those northern states spared the same fate should be to
rescue them from it. This was both a political obligation and a “matter
of humanity” toward both the slaves and those who owned them. The Quaker
petitions were therefore not treasonable or out of order. They were “as
worthy as anything that can come before the house.” Gerry then presented
his own personal estimate of the revenue required to compensate the slave
owners for purchasing their slaves at current market value and came up with the
figure of $10 million. How he derived this amount was murky—it was much
lower than any realistic estimate—but his thinking about the source for
the revenue was clear: Voters would not accept a tax sufficient to cover these
costs, so the only plausible course would be to establish a national fund for
this purpose created out of the profits from the sale of western lands. As for
the slave trade, the sooner that despicable traffic was ended, the better for
everybody.
¹²

Although the
sectional battle lines were clearly drawn in the debate, the position of the
Virginia delegation was equivocal. Representative John Page, for example,
seemed to offer one of the most ringing endorsements of the petitions. He
warned his colleagues from the Deep South that their opposition to the mere
mention of an end to slavery and the slave trade was misguided. The real threat
was silence. But then Page explained his thinking, which went like this:
Reports of this debate would eventually find their way into the slave quarters
of the South, and when the slaves learned that Congress would not even consider
ways to mitigate their condition or end their misery, they would have no hope.
The consequence would be slave insurrections, for “if anything could
induce him [a slave] to rebel, it must be a stroke like this.”
¹³

Madison’s thinking was decidedly less eccentric, although still
problematic. As befitted the central player in the Constitutional Convention,
Madison emphasized the various legal obligations imposed by the compact of
1787. While he thought the Constitution was crystal clear that Congress could
not restrict or terminate the slave trade before 1808, it did not prohibit the
members of the House from talking about the issue. They could talk about
anything they wished, including the gradual abolition of slavery itself, though
he felt that Congress was unlikely to take any dramatic action “tending
to the emancipation of the slaves.” It could, however, opt to “make
some regulation respecting the introduction of them [slaves] in the new states,
to be formed out of the Western Territory,” a matter he thought
“well worthy of consideration.” On the all-important question of
the implicit understanding about the future of slavery itself, whether it was
presumed to be on the road to extinction or forever protected where it already
existed, Madison did not comment.
¹⁴

Given the
sharp sectional divisions in the debate, the vote to refer the petitions to a
committee was surprisingly one-sided, 43 to 11; seven of the negative votes
came from South Carolina and Georgia. Nor was anyone from either of those two
states willing to serve on the committee, which was instructed to report its
findings to the full House before the end of the session. Thus ended, at least
for the time being, the fullest public exchange of views on the most
deep-rooted problem facing the new American republic.
¹⁵

H
INDSIGHT PERMITS
us to listen to the
debate of 1790 with knowledge that none of the participants possessed. For we
know full well what they could perceive dimly, if at all—namely, that
slavery would become the central and defining problem for the next seventy
years of American history; that the inability to take decisive action against
slavery in the decades immediately following the Revolution permitted the size
of the enslaved population to grow exponentially and the legal and political
institutions of the developing U.S. government to become entwined in
compromises with slavery’s persistence; and that eventually over 600,000
Americans would die in the nation’s bloodiest war to resolve the crisis,
a trauma generating social shock waves that would reverberate for at least
another century.

What is familiar history for us, however, was still
the unknown future for them. And while the debate of 1790 reveals that they
were profoundly interested in what the future would bring, their arguments were
rooted in the past they knew best, which is to say, the recent experience of
the successful revolutionary struggle against Great Britain and the even more
recent creation of a federal government uniting the thirteen states into a more
cohesive nation. The core of the disagreement in the debate of 1790 revolved
around different versions of what has come to be called America’s
“original intentions,” more specifically what the Revolution meant
for the institution of slavery. One’s answer, it turned out, depended a
great deal on which founding moment, 1776 or 1787, seemed most seminal. And it
depended almost entirely on the geographic and demographic location of the
person posing the question.

At least at the rhetorical level, the
egalitarian principles on which the American revolutionaries had based their
war for independence from Great Britain placed slavery on the permanent
defensive and gave what seemed at the time a decisive advantage to the
antislavery side of any debate. Jefferson’s initial draft of the
Declaration of Independence had included language that described the slave
trade as the perverse plot of an evil English monarch designed to contaminate
innocent colonists. Though the passage was deleted by the Continental Congress
in the final draft, it nevertheless captured the nearly rhapsodic sense that
the American Revolution was both a triumphant and transformative moment in
world history, when all laws and human relationships dependent on coercion
would be swept away forever. And however utopian and excessive the natural
rights section of the Declaration (“We hold these truths to be
self-evident”) might appear later on, in the crucible of the
revolutionary moment it gave lyrical expression to a widespread belief that a
general emancipation of slaves was both imminent and inevitable, the natural
consequence and fitting capstone of a glorious liberation from medieval mores
historically associated with the very British government that Americans were
rejecting. If the Bible were a somewhat contradictory source when it came to
the question of slavery, the Declaration of Independence, the secular version
of American scripture, was an unambiguous tract for abolition.
¹⁶

In the long
run, as we know, the liberal values of the Declaration did indeed win out. But
we also need to recognize that in the short run, during and immediately after
the war for independence, there was a prevailing consensus that slavery was
already on the road to extinction. In 1776, for example, when the Continental
Congress voted to repeal the nonimportation agreement of 1774, it chose to
retain its prohibition against the importation of African slaves, a clear
statement of opposition to the resumption of the slave trade. The manpower
needs created by the six-year war generated several emancipation schemes
whereby slaves would be freed and their owners compensated in return for
enlistment for the duration of the conflict. Though this was really an
emergency proposal dictated by the military crisis, and was ultimately rejected
by the planter class in South Carolina and Georgia, its very suggestion seemed
prophetic. Toward the end of the war, Lafayette, that paragon of the
Franco-American alliance who was always eager to join the parade when history
was on the march, urged Washington to declare a general emancipation for all
slaves in Virginia and resettle them in the western region of the state as
tenant farmers.
¹⁷

But these
were merely inspirational episodes that never quite lived up to their promise.
The most tangible and enduring antislavery effects of the revolutionary
mentality occurred in the northern states during and immediately after the war.
Vermont (1777) and New Hampshire (1779) made slavery illegal in their state
constitutions. Massachusetts declared it unconstitutional in a state Supreme
Court decision (1783). Pennsylvania (1780) and Rhode Island (1784) passed laws
ending it immediately within their borders. Connecticut (1784) followed suit
with a gradual emancipation plan. New York and New Jersey, which contained the
largest slave populations north of the Chesapeake, proved more recalcitrant for
that very reason. But despite the defeat there of several gradual emancipation
schemes in the 1780s, defenders of slavery in the northern states were clearly
fighting a losing battle; abolition in the North was more a question of when
than whether.
¹⁸

Nor was this
all. In 1782 the Virginia legislature passed a law permitting slave owners to
free their slaves at their own discretion. By the end of the decade, there were
over twelve thousand freedmen in the state. At the same time, Thomas Jefferson
was writing
Notes on the State of Virginia,
the only book he ever
published, in which he sketched out a plan whereby all slaves born after 1800
would eventually become free. In 1784 Jefferson also proposed a bill in the
federal Congress prohibiting slavery in all the western territories; it failed
to pass by a single vote. One did not need to be a hopeless visionary to
conjure up a mental picture of the American Revolution as a dramatic explosion
that had destroyed the very foundation on which slavery rested and then
radiated out its emancipatory energies with irresistible force: The slave trade
was generally recognized as a criminal activity; slavery was dead or dying
throughout the northern states; the expansion of the institution into the West
looked uncertain; Virginia appeared to be the beachhead for an antislavery
impulse destined to sweep through the South; the time seemed ripe to reconcile
America’s republican rhetoric with a new postrevolutionary
reality.
¹⁹

This uplifting vision, it turned out, was mostly a mirage. In fact, the
very presumptiveness of the revolutionary rhetoric served to obfuscate the
quite palpable reality that slavery, no matter how anomalous in purely
ideological terms, was still deeply imbedded in the very structure of American
society at multiple levels or layers that remained impervious to wishful
thinking and revolutionary expectations.

The passionate conviction that
the Revolution was like a mighty wave fated to sweep slavery off the American
landscape actually created false optimism and fostered a misguided sense of
inevitability that rendered human action or agency superfluous. (Why bother
with specific schemes when history would soon arrive with all the answers?)
Moreover, one of the reasons the Revolution proved so successful as a movement
for independence was that its immediate and short-run goals were primarily
political: removing royal governors and rewriting state constitutions that, in
fact, already embodied many of the republican features the Revolution now
sanctioned. Removing slavery, however, was not like removing British officials
or revising constitutions. In isolated pockets of New York and New Jersey, and
more panoramically in the entire region south of the Potomac, slavery was woven
into the fabric of American society in ways that defied appeals to logic or
morality. It also enjoyed the protection of one of the Revolution’s most
potent legacies, the right to dispose of one’s property without arbitrary
interference from others, especially when the others resided far away or
claimed the authority of some distant government. There were, to be sure,
radical implications latent in the “principles of ’76”
capable of challenging privileged appeals to property rights, but the secret of
their success lay in their latency—that is, the gradual and surreptitious
ways they revealed their egalitarian implications over the course of the
nineteenth century. If slavery’s cancerous growth was to be arrested and
the dangerous malignancy removed, it demanded immediate surgery. The radical
implications of the revolutionary legacy were no help at all so long as they
remained only implications.
²⁰

The depth
and apparent intractability of the problem became much clearer during the
debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Although
the final draft of the document was conspicuously silent on slavery, the
subject itself haunted the closed-door debates. No less a source than Madison
believed that slavery was the central cause of the most elemental division in
the Constitutional Convention: “the States were divided into different
interests not by their difference of size,” Madison observed, “but
principally from their having or not having slaves.… It did not lie
between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and
Southern.”
²¹

The
delegates from New England and most of the Middle Atlantic states drew directly
on the inspirational rhetoric of the revolutionary legacy to argue that slavery
was inherently incompatible with the republican values on which the American
Revolution had been based. They wanted an immediate end to the slave trade, an
explicit statement prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the western
territories as a condition for admission into the union, and the adoption of a
national plan for gradual emancipation analogous to those state plans already
adopted in the North. The most forceful expression of the northern position on
the slave trade came, somewhat ironically, from Luther Martin of Maryland, who
denounced it as “an odious bargain with sin” that was
“inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonorable to
the American character.” The fullest expression of the northern position
on abolition itself came from Gouverneur Morris, a New Yorker, but serving as a
delegate from Pennsylvania, who described slavery as “a curse” that
actually retarded the economic development of the South and “the most
prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed
Constitution.” Morris even proposed a national tax to compensate the
slave owners, claiming that he would much prefer “a tax for paying for
all the Negroes in the United States than saddle posterity with such a
Constitution.” In the speeches of Martin and Morris one can discern the
clearest articulation of the view, later embraced by the leadership of the
abolitionist movement, that slavery was a nonnegotiable issue; that this was
the appropriate and propitious moment to place it on the road to ultimate
extinction; and that any compromise of that long-term goal was a
“covenant with death.”
²²