³Founding Fathers and Slavery²

American Historical Review, 1972
by
William W. Freehling

ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, in a historical age now grown as arcadian as Thomas Jefferson himself, no man needed to defend the Founding Fathers on slavery. However serious were their sins and however greedy seemed their pursuits, the men who made the American Revolution were deemed to have placed black slavery at bay. Patriots such as George Washington, historians used to point out, freed their slaves, and only if Eli Whitney hadn¹t invented the cotton gin, slavery would have died out in all America.

This happy tale, once so important and so widely believed, now lies withered by a decade of attack. Scholars such as Robert McColley, Staughton Lynd, William Cohen, and Winthrop Jordan have assaulted every aspect of the old interpretation. Some revisionists write to correct excesses in the former view. Others are driven by a New Leftist repugnance for anyone contaminated by racism. Whatever their separate reasons and however qualified their individual positions, these scholars, taken together, have hammered out a new image of the Founding Fathers. The image is not attractive.

The Declaration of Independence, it is now argued, was a white man's document that its author rarely applied to his or to any slaves. The Constitution created aristocratic privilege while consolidating black bondage. Virginia shrank from abolition, for slave prices were too high and race fears too great. Jefferson himself suspected blacks were innately inferior. He bought and sold slaves; he advertised for fugitives; he ordered lashes well laid on. He lived in the grand manner, burying prayers for freedom under an avalanche of debt. In all these evasions and missed opportunities Jefferson spoke for his age. For whatever the virtues of the Founding Fathers, concludes the new view, they hardly put slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. It seems fitting, then, that when Southerners turned their backs on the Declaration and swung toward reaction in the wake of the Missouri crisis, the sage of Monticello himself helped point the way.

Many admirers of Jefferson, aware of a brighter side, scorn this judgment and yearn for a reassessment. The following essay, while in sympathy with their position, is not written for their reasons. More is at stake than Thomas Jefferson; indeed Jefferson's agonized positions on slavery are chiefly important as the supreme embodiment of a generation's travail. Moreover, the historian's task is not to judge but to explain: and the trouble with the new condemnatory view is not so much that it is a one-sided judgment of the Founding Fathers as that it distorts the process by which American slavery was abolished. The new charge that the Founding Fathers did next to nothing about bondage is as misleading as the older notion that they almost did everything. The abolitionist process proceeded slowly but inexorably from 1776 to 1860 slowly in part because of what Jefferson and his contemporaries did not do, inexorably in part because of what they did. The impact of the Founding Fathers on slavery, like the extent to which the American Revolution was revolutionary, must be seen in the long run not in terms of what changed in the late eighteenth century but in terms of how the Revolutionary experience changed the whole of American antebellum history. Any such view must place Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, for all their ironies and missed opportunities, back into the creeping American antislavery process.

IF MEN WERE EVALUATED in terms of dreams rather than deeds everyone would concede the antislavery credentials of the Founding Fathers. No American Revolutionary could square the principles of the Declaration with the perpetuation of human bondage. Only a few men of 1776 considered the evil of slavery permanently necessary. None dared proclaim the evil a good. Most looked forward to the day when the curse could be forever erased from the land. ³The love of justice and the love of country," Jefferson wrote Edward Coles in 1814,² plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain."

If the Founding Fathers unquestionably dreamed of universal American freedom. their ideological posture was weighed down equally unquestionably with conceptions of priorities. profits, and prejudices that would long make the dream utopian. The master passion of the age was not with extending liberty to blacks but with erecting republics for whites. Creative energies poured into designing a political City on the Hill: and the blueprints for utopia came to be the federal Constitution and American union. When the slavery issue threatened the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention the Deep South's ultimatums were quickly met. When the Missouri crisis threatened the Union Jefferson and fellow spirits beat a retreat. This pattern of valuing the Union more than abolition-of marrying the meaning of America to the continuation of a particular government-would persist, producing endless compromises and finally inspiring Lincoln's war.

The realization of the Founding Fathers' antislavery dream was blocked also by the concern for property rights articulated in their Declaration. Jefferson's document at once denounced slave chains as immoral and sanctioned slave property as legitimate. It made the slave's right to freedom no more natural- than the master's right to property. Liberty for blacks became irrevocably tied to compensation for whites: and if some proposed paying masters for slaves, no one conceived of compensating South Carolina planters for the fabulous swamp estates emancipation would wreck.
The financial cost of abolition, heavy enough by itself, was made too staggering to bear by the Founding Fathers' racism, an ideological hindrance to antislavery no less important than their sense of priorities and their commitment to property. Here again Jefferson typified the age. As Winthrop Jordan has shown, Jefferson suspected that blacks had greater sexual appetites and lower intellectual faculties than did whites. As Merrill Peterson points out, Jefferson also suspected blacks were inferior rather than suspecting blacks were equal. These suspicions, together with Jefferson¹s painfully accurate prophecy that free blacks and free whites could not live harmoniously in America for centuries, made him and others tie American emancipation to African colonization. The alternative appeared to be race riot and sexual chaos. The consequence, heaping the cost of colonization on the cost of abolition, made the hurdles to emancipation seem unsurmountable.

Jefferson and the men of the Revolution, however, continually dreamed of leaping ahead when the time was ripe. In 1814, while lamenting his own failure, Jefferson urged others to take up the crusade. "I had always hoped," he wrote Edward Coles--that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast ... would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it." As late as 1824, five years after his retreat in the Missouri crisis, Jefferson suggested a federally financed abolition scheme that would have ended slavery faster than the plan proposed by his grandson. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in the famed Virginia slavery debate of 1832.

The ideological stance of Jefferson and other Founding Fathers on slavery, then, was profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand they were restrained by their overriding interest in creating the Union, by their concern for property rights, and by their visions of race war and miscegenation. On the other hand they embraced a revolutionary ideology that made emancipation inescapable. The question is, How was this theoretical ambivalence resolved in practical action?

The answer, not surprisingly, is also ambivalent. Whenever dangers to Union, property, or racial order seemed to them acute the Founding Fathers did little. In the short run, especially in those Deep Southern states where the going was stickiest, they did almost nothing. But whenever abolition dangers seemed to them manageable Jefferson and his contemporaries moved effectively, circumscribing and crippling the institution and thereby gutting, its long-range capacity to endure.

The revisionist view of the Founding Fathers is at its best in emphasizing slavery's short-run strength in Jefferson's South. For example, after the Constitution was ratified slavery showed its strength by expanding over the West. ³The years of slavery's supposed decline," Robert S. McColley points out.²were in fact the years of its greatest expansion. In the age of Jefferson black bondage spread across Kentucky and engulfed Alabama and Mississippi. Furthermore, Jefferson as president acquired slave Louisiana, and Jefferson as elder statesman gave his blessings to the resulting diffusion of the system.

Slavery showed its strength not only in Jefferson¹s Virginia legislature, the Philadelphia's Constitutional Convention, and Louisiana's black deltas but also at Monticello itself. By freeing their slaves George Washington and John Randolph lived up to Revolutionary ideals. These men, however, were exceptions. Thomas Jefferson, who freed nine while blithely piling up debts that precluded freeing the rest, was the rule The plantation life style, with its elegant manner and extravagant tastes, lessened the chance of reducing debts and allowing quick manumission on a massive scale. That life style, in Virginia and throughout the South, was as integral a part of slavery as was South Carolina's hunger for Africans and the Southwest's commitment to cotton.

The master of Monticello, finally, revealed the towering practical strength of slavery in the notorious case of Sally Hemings, his mulatto house servant. Those who enjoy guessing whether Jefferson sired Sally's many offspring can safely be left to their own speculations. The evidence is wildly circumstantial and the issue of dubious importance.

The old view, then, that slavery was dying in Jefferson's South cannot withstand the revisionist onslaught. The system was strong and, in places, growing stronger; and the combination of economic interest, concern for the Union, life style, and race prejudice made emancipationists rare in Virginia and almost nonexistent in South Carolina. Jefferson, no immediate emancipationist, refused as president to endorse an antislavery poem that had been sent to him for his approval. He could not, he said, ³interpose with decisive effect² to produce emancipation. To interpose at all was to toss away other reforms. Here as always, Jefferson reveals himself as the pragmatic statesman, practicing government as the art of the possible. An idealist might fault him for refusing to commit political suicide by practicing utopian politics. But all the evidence shows that as a practical politician Jefferson accurately gauged impassable obstacles. The point is crucial: long before Garrison, when Jefferson ruled, peaceful abolition was not possible.

What could be done? What Jefferson and his contemporaries did was to attack slavery where it was weakest, thereby driving the institution south and reducing its capacity to survive. In a variety of ways the Founding Fathers took positive steps that demonstrated their antislavery instincts and that, taken together, drastically reduced the slavocracy's potential area, population, and capacity to endure.

The first key reform took place in the North. When the American Revolution began slavery was a national institution, thriving both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. Slaves comprised 14 per cent of the New York population, with other figures ranging from 8 per cent in New jersey to 6 per cent in Rhode Island and 3 per cent in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. In these states. unlike Virginia, percentages of slaves were low enough to permit an unconvulsive variety of reform.

Still, prior to 1776. abolitionists such as John Woolman found the North barren soil for antislavery ideas. As John Jay recalled, ³the great majority of Northerners accepted slavery as a matter of course, and very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it." The movement of 1776 changed all this. The humanitarian zeal of the Revolutionary era, together with nonslaveholder hatred of slave competition and universal acknowledgment that the economy did not need slavery, doomed Northern slavery to extinction. In some states the doom was long delayed as Northern slaveholders fought to keep their bondsmen. Slavery was not altogether ended in New York until 1827 and in New jersey until well into the 1840s. By 1830, however, less than one per cent of the 125,000 Northern blacks were slaves. Bondage had been made a peculiar institution, retained alone in the Southern states.

No less important than abolition in old Northern states was the long and bitter fight to keep bondage from expanding. In the famed Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for example, Congress decreed slavery illegal immediately in the upper Western territories. The new law left bondage free to invade the Southwest. But without the Northwest Ordinance slavery might have crept into Illinois and Indiana as well. for even with it bondage found much support in the Midwest.

More important than preventing the spread of slavery into the North West Ordinance was the abolition of the African trade. This accomplishment, too often dismissed as a non-accomplishment, shows more clearly than anything else the impact on anti-slavery of the Revolutionary generation. Furthermore, nowhere else does one see so clearly that Thomas Jefferson helped cripple the Southern slave establishment.

The drive to abolish the African slave trade began with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, with the concurrence of Virginia and the upper South, sought to condemn King George for foisting Africans on his colonies. South Carolina and Georgia, less sure they had enough slaves, demanded the clause be killed. Jefferson acquiesced. Thus was prefigured, at the first moment of national history, the split between upper and lower South that less than a century later would contribute mightily to the disruption of the republic.

At the Constitutional Convention, as we have seen, lower South delegates again postponed a national decision on slave importations. This time a compromise was secured, allowing but not requiring Congress to abolish the trade after twenty years. A year before the deadline Jefferson, now presiding at the White House, urged Congress to seize its opportunity. ³I congratulate you, fellow citizens," he wrote in his annual message of December 2, 1806, " on the approach of the period when you may interpose Your authority constitutionally² to stop Americans "from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe." Although the law could not take effect until January 1, 1808 noted Jefferson, the reform, if passed in 1807, 1807, could make certain that no extra African was dragged legally across the seas. In 1807 Congress enacted Jefferson's proposal.

The new law, although one of the most important acts an American Congress ever passed, did not altogether end African importations. Americans illegally imported approximately one thousand blacks annually until 1860. This is, however, a tiny fraction of the number that could have been imported if the trade had been legal and considered legitimate. Brazil imported over a million and a half slaves from 1807 to 1860, and the Deep South's potential to absorb bondsmen was greater. South Carolina alone imported ten thousand blacks a year in the early nineteenth century, before the law of 1808 went into effect. Louisiana creole planters sought unsuccessfully to make Jefferson's administration grant them the same privilege. The desire of Virginia slaveholders to keep slave prices high no doubt helped feed the abolition of the trade, just as the desire of Illinois nonslaveholders to keep out blacks helped give Edward Coles his triumph. In both cases, however, the Revolutionary generation's conception of slavery as a moral disaster was of undeniable significance.

The law that closed the trade and saved millions of Africans from servitude on new Southwestern plantations also aided slaves already on those plantations. It made slaves already in the South more expensive, and thus they received better treatment from plantation owners than slaves imported annually into Brazil or Hati.

Perhaps the most important long-run impact of closing the trade was to help push bondage deeper into the South, thereby continuing the work the Fathers had begun with Northern abolition and the Northwest Ordinance. Now that African markets were closed the new Southwest had to procure its slaves from Northern slave states. By 1860 the resulting slave drain had significantly reduced percentage of slaves and commitments to slavery throughout the border area stretching from Delaware through Maryland and Kentucky into Missouri. Whereas in 1790 almost 20 per cent of American slaves lived in this most northern tier of border slave states, the figure was down to 10 per cent and falling by 1860. On the other hand, in 1790 the area that became the seven Deep South states had 20 per cent of American slaves and by 1860 the figure was up to 54 per cent and rising. During the cotton boom the shift was especially dramatic. From 1830 to 1860 the percentage of slaves in Delaware declined from 4 to 1 per cent; in Maryland from 23 to 13 per cent; in Kentucky from 24 to 19 percent; in Missouri from 18 to 10 percent.

By both reducing the economic reliance on slavery and the psychic fear of blacks this great migration had political consequences. Antislavery politicians, echoing Hinton R. Helper¹s appeals to white racism, garnered thousands of votes and several elections, especially in Missouri, during the 1850s. It was only a beginning, but it was similar to the early stages of the demise of slavery in New York.

While the end of the slave trade indirectly drained slaves from the border South another Revolutionary legacy, the tradition of individual manumission, further weakened the institution in the Northern slave states. Although Jefferson did not live up to his dictum that antislavery planters should free their slaves many upper South masters followed precept rather than example in the antebellum years. The Virginia law of 1806, forcing freed slaves to leave the state in a year, did not halt the process as absolutely as some have supposed. Virginia laws passed in 1819 and 1837 allowed county courts to grant exceptions. The ensuing trickle of manumissions was a festering sore to the Virginia slave establishment.

Meanwhile, in two border states, manumission sabotaged the institution
more insistently. Delaware. which had slaves and 4,000 free blacks in 1790, had 1, 800 slaves and 20,000 free blacks in 1860. Maryland. with 103,000 slaves and 8,000 free blacks in 1790, had 87,000 slaves and 84,000 free blacks in 1860. These two so-called slave states came close to being free Negro states on the eve of Lincoln's election. Indeed, the Maryland manumission rate compares favorably with those of Brazil and Cuba, countries that supposedly a monopoly on Western Hemispheric voluntary emancipation.

The manumission tradition was slowly but relentlessly changing the character of states such as Maryland in large part because of a final Jeffersonian legacy: the belief that slavery was an evil that must some day be ended. Particularly In the upper South. this argument remained alive. It informed the works of so-called proslavery propagandists, and it gnawed at the consciences of thousands of slaveholders as they made up their wills. Jefferson's condemnation of slavery had thrown the South forever on the defensive, and all the efforts of the George Fitzhughs could never produce a unanimously proslavery society.

In summary. then, the Revolutionary generation found slavery a national institution, with the slave trade open and Northern abolitionists almost unheard. When Jefferson and his contemporaries left the national stage they willed to posterity a crippled, restricted, peculiar institution. Attacking slavery' successfully where it was weakest they swept it out of the North and kept it away from the Northwest. They left the antebellum South unable to secure more slaves when immigrants rushed to the North. Most important of all, their law closing the slave trade and their tradition concerning individual manumissions constituted a doubly sharp weapon superbly calculated to continue pushing slavery south. By 1860 Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and the area to become West Virginia all had fewer staves than New York possessed at the time of the Revolution, and Kentucky did not have many more. The goal of abolition had become almost as practicable in these border states as it had been in the North in 1776. As the Civil War began, slavery remained secure in only eleven of the fifteen slave states while black migration toward the tropics showed every capacity to continue eroding the institution in Virginia and driving slavery down to the Gulf.

If the Founding Fathers had done none of this-if slavery had continued in the North and expanded into the Northwest: if millions of Africans had been imported to strengthen slavery in the Deep South, to consolidate it in New York and Illinois, to spread it to Kansas, and to keep it in the border South: if no free black population had developed in Delaware and Maryland, no apology for slavery had left Southerners on shaky moral grounds; if, in short, Jefferson and his contemporaries had lifted nary a finger would have been different. Because all of this was done slavery was more and more confined in the Deep South as the nineteenth century progressed.