Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
43.
Quotations from the
Daily Advertiser
reproduced in Boyd, vol. 17, 452, 460. See also Bowling,
The Creation of Washington,
201.
44.
“Jefferson’s Report to Washington on Meeting Held at Georgetown,” 14 September 1790, Boyd, vol. 17, 461–462.
45.
Thomas Lee Shippen to William Shippen, 15 September 1790, ibid., 464–465, for the Jefferson-Madison tour of the region in September; Jefferson to Washington, 17 September 1790, ibid., 466–467, for the conversation at Mount Vernon. “Memorandum on the Residence Act,” 29 August 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 294–296, for Madison’s concurrence on the executive strategy as the preferred solution. Bowling,
The Creation of Washington,
212–213, for Washington’s land holdings within the designated site.
46.
Jefferson to Washington, 27 October 1790, Boyd, vol. 17, 643–644; Madison’s speech in the House is reprinted in Rutland, vol. 12, 264–266.
47.
John Harvie, Jr., to Jefferson, 3 August 1790, Boyd, vol. 17, 296; Carrington to Madison, 24 December 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 331–332, which includes the language of the Virginia resolution quoted here.
48.
Federal Gazette,
20 November 1790, quoted in Boyd, vol. 17, 459.
49.
“Conjectures About the New Constitution,” 17–30 September 1787, Syrett, vol. 6, 59; Hamilton to John Jay, 13 November 1790, Syrett, vol. 7, 149–150.
50.
Three scholarly books touch upon these themes in different ways: Richard Buel, Jr.,
Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics,
1789
–
1815
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1972); Roger Sharp,
American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis
(New Haven, 1993), which is especially good on the contingent character of the constitutional settlement; and Elkins and McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism,
which includes the problematic theme within its panoramic scope.
51.
Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, 24 November 1818,
Adams,
reel 122.
52.
On the construction of Washington, D.C., in the 1790s, see Bob Arnebeck,
Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington,
1790
–
1800
(Lanham, Md., 1991). The seminal study on the distinctive physical conditions the new capital imposed on political life is James Sterling Young,
The Washington Community,
1800
–
1828
(New York, 1966).
53.
Elkins and McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism,
163–193, for an extended reflection on the national and cultural implications of making the new capital a pastoral place.
CHAPTER THREE: THE SILENCE
1.
Linda Grant De Pauw et al.,
Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States,
15 vols. (Baltimore, 1972), vol. 12, 277–87. The debates over the Quaker petitions are mentioned in passing in most secondary accounts of the period. See, for example, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic,
1787
–
1800
(New York, 1993), 151–152. The fullest and most recent scholarly treatment is by Richard S. Newman, “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the First Federal Congress,”
JER
16 (1996): 571–599. See also Howard Ohline, “Slavery, Economics, and Congressional Politics,”
JSH
46 (1980): 355–360.
2.
First Congress,
vol. 12, 287–288.
3.
Ibid., 289–290.
4.
First Congress,
vol. 3, 294. The text of the petitions are most readily available in Alfred Zilversmit,
The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North
(Chicago, 1967), 159–160.
5.
More, much more, on this subject shortly. For now, the best surveys of the topic are Donald L. Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics
(New York, 1971), 201–247; David Brion Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 122–131; Duncan J. MacLeod,
Slavery, Race and the American Revolution
(Cambridge, 1974), 37–39; Paul Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson
(London, 1996), 1–33. See also Sylvia R. Frey,
Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
(Princeton, 1991).
6.
First Congress,
vol. 12, 296.
7.
Ibid., 307–308.
8.
Ibid., 308–310.
9.
Ibid., 297–298, 310–311. There are several versions of the debate recorded in
First Congress,
based on the several newspaper accounts published at the time and the official account in the
Congressional Register.
The accounts seldom disagree, though they vary in length and detail.
10.
Ibid., 308.
11.
Ibid., 296–297, 307.
12.
Ibid., 298–299, 305–306.
13.
Ibid., 311.
14.
Ibid., 312.
15.
First Congress,
vol. 3, 295–296.
16.
Gary B. Nash,
Race and Revolution
(Madison, 1990), 3–24, offers the most robust neoabolitionist interpretation of the revolutionary era. All the standard treatments of the subject emphasize the exuberant expectations generated by the revolutionary ideology: Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
48–55; Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics,
98–130; Winthrop Jordan,
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,
1550
–
1812
(Chapel Hill, 1968), 269–314. On the resonant and quasi-religious power of the Declaration of Independence, see Pauline Maier,
American Scripture: Making the Declaration
of Independence
(New York, 1997). See also the collection of essays in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds.,
Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution
(Charlottesville, 1983).
17.
Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics,
124–129; MacLeod,
Slavery, Race and the American Revolution,
21–29; Quaker Petition to the Continental Congress, 4 October 1783, Record Group 360, National Archives, Washington, D.C. The best collection of documents on this phase of the antislavery movement is Roger Burns, ed.,
Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America,
1688
–
1788
(New York, 1977), 397–490. On slavery itself, the authoritative work is Philip Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country
(Chapel Hill, 1998).
18.
Zilversmit,
The First Emancipation,
109–138.
19.
Robert McColley,
Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia
(Urbana, Ill., 1964), 141–162. For Jefferson’s early leadership, see Joseph J. Ellis,
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
(New York, 1997), 144–146.
20.
This paragraph represents my attempt to negotiate the scholarly minefield that confronts anyone trying to explain the anomalous character of slavery within the ideological legacy of the American Revolution. The standard account, still quite impressive for its subtle treatment of the ironies and intellectual disjunctions, is Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.
The most forceful argument for the radical implications of the revolutionary ideology is Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York, 1992), which emphasizes the egalitarian legacy that then seeped out slowly to create the democratic society that Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1830s. If, however, one makes slavery the acid test of the revolutionary ideology, the legacy looks less than radical. The best treatment of that version is William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” in William W. Freehling, ed.,
The Reinterpretation of American History: Slavery and the Civil War
(New York, 1994), 76–84.
21.
The Madison quotation is from the debates at the Constitutional Convention (28 June 1787) in Max Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention of
1787
,
4 vols. (New Haven, 1937), vol. 1, 486–487. The most succinct recent study of the role of slavery at the convention is Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders,
1–33. The groundbreaking scholarly analysis is Staughton Lynd, ed.,
Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays
(Indianapolis, 1967). The most comprehensive assessment within the larger context of “original intent” is Jack N. Rakove,
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
(New York, 1996), 58, 70–74, 90–93.
22.
Records,
vol. 2221–223, 364–365, 396–403.
23.
Records,
vol. 1, 605; vol. 2, 306.
24.
Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders,
34–57, for the most recent scholarly assessment of the Northwest Ordinance, which emphasizes its inherent ambiguity. A more optimistic interpretation is suggested in William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,”
AHR
77 (1972): 81–93. See also Peter Onuf, “From Constitution to Higher Law: The Reinterpretation of the Northwest Ordinance,”
Ohio History
94 (1985): 5–33.
25.
Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders,
19–31; Rakove,
Original Meanings,
85–89.
26.
Jonathan Elliot, ed.,
The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,
5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896), vol. 2, 41, 149, 484.
27.
Elliot, ed.,
Debates,
vol. 4, 286.
28.
McColley,
Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia,
120, 163–190. For Madison’s remark on the three-fifths clause, see Clinton Rossiter, ed.,
The Federalist Papers
(New York, 1961), 338–339.
29.
Elliot, ed.,
Debates,
vol. 3, 273, 452–453, 598–599. An excellent overview of the larger set of issues raised by the ambiguity of the Constitution on slavery is William Wiecek,
The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America,
1760
–
1840
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1977).
30.
First Congress,
vol. 12, 649–662.
31.
This is a large claim, but it is rooted in the evidence (coming up in the next few pages) and in keeping with the best scholarly overview of the subject by Larry Tise,
Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America,
1701
–
1840
(Athens, Ga., 1987).
32.
First Congress,
vol. 12, 719–721, 725–735.
33.
Ibid., 750–761.
34.
Tise,
Proslavery,
97–123, which claims that even the “positive good” argument was part of the Deep South’s position in the revolutionary era. I cannot go quite that far, even though the Deep South did argue that Africans actually preferred slavery to impoverished freedom or to life in Africa. What is missing in the revolutionary era, however, is the claim that the conditions of life for slaves in the South were preferable to the conditions for factory workers in the North, which would have been a historic impossibility, since factories had yet to appear. The late-eighteenth-century proslavery position, I believe, was more defensive. See, for example, Eric R. Papenfuse,
The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery
(Philadelphia, 1997), and John P. Kaminski, ed.,
A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution
(Madison, 1994).
35.
The most elegant argument for the creation of a distinctive racial ideology in this period is Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,”
New Left Review
181 (1990): 95–118. The magisterial argument for the long-standing existence of racial attitudes and convictions is Jordan,
White Over Black.
What I am attempting to argue here is that a coherent or explicit racial ideology had been unnecessary before this period, because slavery institutionalized the presumption of white Anglo-Saxon superiority and rendered an explicit or systematic racial ideology superfluous. Just as the most virulent racial legislation in American history appeared after slavery was ended in the late nineteenth century, the most potent racial arguments surfaced when slavery was threatened in the late eighteenth century. But the underlying values on which all the formal arguments and laws were based had been present for centuries. For a discussion of the racial implications of the proposed seal for the United States, see Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics,
135.
36.
The phrase about “revolutionary time” is from Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
306. On the one hand, Davis’s book remains the most sophisticated and comprehensive assessment of the extended historical moment when the fate of slavery seemed to hang in the balance after the Revolution. On the other hand, because it considers the fifty-year period as a single piece, the patterns within the period are blurred into the larger whole and the inevitability of the eventual failure shadows the entire survey. The strongest case for the viability of a national antislavery program is Nash,
Race and Revolution,
which emphasizes the historic opportunity without putting a specific date on the closing of that opportunity, but which ignores altogether the powerful forces confronting any antislavery initiative and then makes the rather bizarre claim that the chief responsibility, even culpability, for the failure rests with the North. The argument here, which strikes me as incontrovertible, is that the key was Virginia.