Slave Nation (11 page)

Adams made clear in later life that he had deferred to the southerners on the issue of slavery: “I constantly said in former times to the southern gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object. I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments.”

This statement makes clear that the southerners had questioned Adams on his view of the slavery question. John Adams knew, when he gave his answer, that the “southern gentlemen” intended to protect the foundation of their society—slavery. Their resolve was spelled out in the instructions from Virginia to secure full control of their internal affairs so that, among other things, they could maintain slavery.
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Adams’s statement to Jefferson is evidence that the most influential colonies—Massachusetts, Virginia, and the slave colonies—agreed to protect colonial slavery when they first met in 1774. Protecting slavery was such an important issue that it was resolved in favor of the South early in the first session of the Continental Congress. As a result, there was never a discussion of it on the floor of Congress. Such a discussion did not take place until many years later when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were both retired.

Adams’s “confession” that he had accepted the South’s position on slavery was part of his late-in-life correspondence with Jefferson, who had been his political enemy in earlier years. Jefferson had defeated Adams for the presidency in 1800, and Adams had been bitter. Benjamin Rush arranged a reconciliation between the two, taking three years to accomplish it, between 1809 and 1812.
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From that time forward they exchanged elegantly composed correspondence drawing on their current interests, their recollections of their exciting past, and their problems of aging, wondering if their prodigious efforts had been worthwhile. Their correspondence about slavery began in 1819, the first year of the conflict over admitting Missouri as a slave state. The issue of whether a state should be “free” or “slave” had up to that time been avoided by admitting states in pairs—one free for one slave state. This meant that state equality in the Senate had been maintained. Northerners attempted to block Missouri’s admission as a slave state, and southerners held the admission of Maine hostage to block that effort. The issue was resolved by admitting Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and extending, to the west, the line between slave and free territory that had been drawn in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
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But before the compromise was reached on March 3, 1820, Jefferson and Adams began an exchange of letters that included the following:

Adams wrote to Jefferson, November 23, 1819, listing a series of issues facing the new Congress, including “the Missouri Slavery,” writing, “Clouds look black and thick…threatening thunder and lightning.”
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Jefferson to Adams, Dec. 10, 1819: Jefferson dismisses the other issues:

They are occurrences which like waves in a storm will pass under the ship. But the Missouri question is a breaker on which we may lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more, God only knows. From the battle of Bunker’s Hill to the treaty of Paris, we never had so ominous a question.
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Adams to Jefferson, Dec. 21, 1819:

The Missouri question I hope will follow the other waves under the ship and do no harm. I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American Empire and our free institutions…but I am sometimes Cassandra enough to dream that another Hamilton, another Burr might rend this mighty fabric in twain.
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Jefferson to Adams, Jan. 22, 1821, after the adoption of the Missouri Compromise:

What does the Holy Alliance, in and out of Congress, mean to do with us on the Missouri question….The real question, as seen in the states afflicted with this unfortunate population is, Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger? For if Congress has the power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free. Are we then to see again Athenian and Lacedemonian confederacies? To wage another Peloponnesian war to settle the ascendancy between them? Or is this the tocsin of merely a servile war? That remains to be seen, but not I hope, by you or me. Surely they will parley a while, and give us time to get out of the way.
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Adams to Jefferson, Feb. 3, 1821:

Slavery in this country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century. [He then alludes to a vision of] armies of Negroes marching and counter-marching in the air, shining in armour. I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the southern gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object. I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments.
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This statement, made in 1821, explains his actions supporting the South on slavery issues at the First Continental Congress in 1774, and continuing in the following years.
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Older histories emphasized the unity of the colonies, not their differences. Twentieth century histories continue to minimize the influence of slavery on the Revolution.
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Modern historians Joseph Ellis, Richard Brookhiser, and David McCullough have minimized Adams’s “confession.” Ellis assumed that there had been an “unspoken promise” to Adams that the South would engage in gradual emancipation. An unspoken promise, if there can be such a thing, sounds at most like wistful thinking by an Adams who needed the South to join the move against Britain. The Virginians’ position that slavery was an evil that would be addressed some time in the future was certainly no promise. South Carolina would never have made such a promise. The idea that the southerners would have left the issue of slavery in the South an open question to be resolved through “unspoken promises” ignores both the intensity of southern interest in the issue, and the high quality of southern lawyers, who would have insisted on clarity on this issue.
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Brookhiser believed that John Adams had “absolutely clean hands” on the slavery issue. He even quotes Adams’s statement to the southern gentlemen that he would “leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments” in support of his proposition. Brookhiser’s explanation is that Adams engaged in wistful thinking about letting slavery die a “natural death.”
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David McCullough, in his
John Adams,
also quotes the statement, but contends that Adams had no solution to the slavery issue.
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Obviously, Adams did have a solution—he supported “the southern gentlemen,” thus assuring that Massachusetts would have the support of the wealthiest and most important of the colonies.

Edward Cody Burnett, a compiler of letters of members of the Continental Congress, did note the potential issue of counting slaves for purposes of state contributions to the federal treasury.

Should the criterion for contributions be population or wealth? If wealth, should it be land values or some broader measure of property values? If population, what about slaves? Should they be counted as part of the population or as property? Though the determination of the latter question may not have seemed so vital a consequence as that of voting, nevertheless, here, at the very beginnings of the nation was sounded an alarum bell that may well have roused the deepest slumber. It would ring out again and more insistently when the Federal Convention should assemble, and yet once more a few years later, even “as a fire bell in the night.”
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The phrase “fire bell in the night” comes from Jefferson’s letter to Congressman John Holmes relating to the Missouri Compromise in 1820 that extended the slave-free area of the country, established in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, beyond the Mississippi to the west. To Jefferson it was “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I consider it at once as the knell of the Union.”
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By quoting his “fire bell” letter, Burnett made clear that, to him, the slavery issue raised its head in 1774.

Most modern historians who write about the First Continental Congress in 1774 mention slavery only with respect to the issue that Burnett addressed, and some quote or summarize Thomas Lynch’s statement in July, 1776, that if it were to be debated if slaves were property, the confederation would be at an end.
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Others speak only about the various and usually failed antislavery activities in the North, and include the banning of the international slave trade long proposed by Virginia for its own interests.
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Jack Rakove, in his highly influential
Beginnings of National Politics
, does not mention slavery at all in connection with the First Congress. He treats Virginia during that period as a subordinate player on a field dominated by northern and middle colonies.
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Some historians have challenged the “majority view” that slavery was not an important issue in the period from 1774–1787. Staughton Lynd, in “Class Conflict, Slavery and the United States Constitution,” and Gary Nash, in
Race and Revolution,
emphasized the choices that were made at the Constitutional Convention regarding slavery-related issues. Other authors who have addressed the slavery issue directly include Donald Robinson (1771), Duncan MacLeod (1974), and Donald Fehrenbacher (2001). Fehrenbacher develops the experiences in the First and Second Continental Congress to a greater depth than the others, but the bulk of his concern is with events occurring after the Constitutional Convention.

It appears that the limited number of written materials concerning the decisions made in the early 1770s has led historians, critical of the decisions concerning slavery at the Constitutional Convention, to accept without serious challenge the older analysis that slavery was essentially irrelevant to the earlier period of the Revolution.

John Adams was afraid that something like this would happen.

He wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1806:

The secret of affairs is never known to the public until after the event, and often not then.…And very often, the real springs, motives, and causes remain secrets in the breasts of a few, and perhaps one, and perish with their keepers.
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In 1815, he raised the same question in his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson.

Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it? The most essential documents, the debates and deliberations in Congress, from 1774 to 1783, were all in secret, and are now lost forever.
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Jefferson replied,

Nobody, except merely its external facts. All its councils, designs, and discussions having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them, these, which are the life and soul of history must be forever unknown.
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Was Adams, in his letter of 1821, telling Jefferson about his early relations with the southern gentlemen, revealing one of those secrets “in the breasts of a few” that might otherwise have perished “with their keeper”?

By 1819 and 1821, when the correspondence between them quoted above took place, their views on slavery had diverged. Jefferson was for states’ rights, and the “diffusion” theory of slavery—let it expand to the west, where it will be spread out so thin that it will fade away. Adams was opposed to this theory, and did not want to see slavery in Missouri.

Adams knew that publishers would be interested in his correspondence with Jefferson, and that these letters would reach the public in the future.
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Knowing this, Adams may have wanted to disclose his agreement to protect slavery at the beginning of the revolutionary struggle in order to distinguish it from his view in 1821. This would not be surprising, given his concern about the writing of history and his well-known propensity for telling the blunt truth.

In 1774, with Boston occupied by the British, the bargaining power of the South as compared to the North was overwhelming. Had Adams, or any northerner, raised the issue of the legitimacy of slavery, the South could simply have walked away from Philadelphia and allowed Massachusetts to sink under the weight of the British forces then in possession. What real choice did John Adams have at that time? When he was old, and opposed to the expansion of slavery, he may have had a wish to, while he was still alive, explain 1774 actions.

The Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who served as Washington’s aide during the Revolution and who led a charge at Yorktown, certainly felt that way:

I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.
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The issue of slavery was presumably resolved to the satisfaction of the slave-holding colonies at the First Continental Congress in the first few days of September, 1774. At that point the Congress began to discuss how to stop British incursions into colonial affairs. As historian Jack Rakove has observed, the authority of the delegates arose from the ways that they had been selected and then instructed on what to do or say at the Congress. Many of the colonies instructed their delegates to support whatever policies the Congress chose to adopt, thus conferring on a majority of the colonies present the power to bind the other colonies.
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Virginia did not so casually surrender its freedom of action to a majority vote in the Congress. Rather, it instructed its delegates specifically with a date when a boycott of British goods and an embargo on sales to Britain should begin. Beyond that, the delegates were urged to “cordially cooperate with our sister colonies in general congress in such other just and proper methods as they, or the majority, shall deem necessary for the accomplishment of the valuable ends.”
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This allowed the delegates to pass judgment on whether the proposals were “just and proper” methods to the valuable end. This drew a critical comment from Jefferson, who noted that it “totally destroys that union of conduct in the several colonies which was the very purpose of calling a congress.”
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From another perspective, it gave the Virginia delegates broad discretion to choose among possible conflicting proposals, and to help shape those that would serve Virginia’s interest. Virginia, having been very specific that the assemblies of each colony possessed “the sole right of directing their internal polity,” would not surrender that authority to a group whose direction, at that point, was unknown.