The Founders and Slavery

[Tom West]

Responding to Paul Finkelman's post of 4-19:

I pass by, without further comment, Prof. Finkelman's
stubborn and inexplicable insistence that there was
nothing noteworthy or radical in Jefferson's 1784
proposal to ban slavery from the entire Western territory
of the U.S.

Nor will I repeat the evidence in my previous post that
Jefferson did in fact propose a gradual abolition law in
Virginia.

I turn instead to Prof. Finkelman's remarkable argument
that Jefferson's draft of the Declaration condemned the
slave trade--but not slavery. Jefferson wrote that the
king violated the Africans' "sacred rights of life and
liberty . . . carrying them into slavery," but Prof.
Finkelman sees no condemnation of slavery in these words!
Is it really necessary for me to point out that if a
"sacred right of liberty" exists, then slavery, which by
definition is a denial of liberty, is a violation of that
right?

But Prof. Finkelman's main argument on this point is not
based on Jefferson's words (which are clearly against
him), but rather on this reasoning: If Jefferson's words
really "were about slavery, then we would assume
Jefferson would have taken his own advice and freed his
slaves on the spot."

Prof. Finkelman's assumption is essentially the same as
Roger Taney's in the Dred Scott decision. Taney reasoned
that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved
African race were not intended to be included [in the
Declaration of Independence], for if the language, as
understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct
of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of
Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly
inconsistent with the principles they asserted." In other
words, if the signers of the Declaration did not
immediately emancipate their slaves, they must not have
believed that slavery is wrong.

What Taney and Finkelman fail to understand, is that one
might believe a thing to be wrong, and yet continue to
tolerate it or even engage in it. Most Americans believe
adultery is wrong, but engage in it because their
passions get the better of themselves.

A more important consideration, however, is that there
were powerful reasons for antislavery men to tolerate the
institution of slavery in early America. (Here I widen
the scope to include not just Jefferson but the entire
founding generation.) Consider this sensible remark by
historian Donald Robinson in his _Slavery in the
Structure of American Politics_, p. 88:

     it is probably fortunate that abolitionism as
     a movement of consequence in America was still
     far off in the future, for if Samuel Adams and
     John Jay and Benjamin Franklin and other
     Northern politicians had forthrightly
     criticized slavery in the early 1770s,
     American history would have developed far
     differently. To begin with, there would have
     been no Association of twelve colonies in
     1774, and certainly no "Unanimous Declaration
     of the Thirteen United States of America."

In other words, if the Founders had done what Finkelman
presumably thinks they should have done, there would have
been no union, the South would have been free to develop
slavery without restraint, and the eventual abolition of
slavery might never have occurred.

The Founders understood political morality not in terms
of right intentions but rather just results. For them,
moral principles give us the goal or end, but prudence
(sensible judgment) must determine the means. After the
Declaration sets forth the principles of political right,
it says, "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments
long established should not be changed for light and
transient causes." A government that violates in some
respects the principle of consent or protection of rights
may be tolerable as the lesser evil, if the alternative
is likely to be worse. The job of the prudent statesman
is to determine the best possible course in a world in
which the immoderate pursuit of moral perfection will
more often lead to misery and terror than to justice and
happiness.

When Lincoln was a young man, he said that the Founders
established "political institutions, conducing more
essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty,
than any of which the history of former times tells us."
Prof. Finkelman would probably scoff at that statement.
Yet from the point of view of the Declaration's
principles, Lincoln was right, in spite of the fact that
slavery was still thriving when he said that. Slavery was
a terrible injustice. But it would have required the
abolition of government by consent to eradicate it during
the founding era. Immediate freedom for the minority
would have ended freedom for the majority.

The totalitarian impulse at work in Marxist communism is
the imprudent, immoderate, and _therefore_ immoral demand
for the abolition of human evil on earth. That impulse
presupposes that human beings can overcome all
significant natural, divine, and human limits. Human
will, or historical progress, is believed to guarantee
this dream. All obstacles to the dream must be ruthlessly
thrust aside, no matter what the cost.

Although the abolitionists were not Marxists, the same
utopian fervor was at work in the abolitionism of the
1830s and 40s (the same time that Marx began to advocate
communism in Europe). Yet abolitionism is the moral
stance most often approved by today's scholars. The
abolitionists were impatient and shrill. They antagonized
the vast majority, North and South. Instead of advancing
the cause of freedom, they promoted Southern
intransigence and Northern disgust with antislavery
opinion. The leading abolitionist, William Lloyd
Garrison, demanded not only the immediate end of slavery,
but (like Marx) "the emancipation of our whole race from
the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, . . .
from the bondage of sin." Garrison had nothing but
contempt for moderation: "On this subject, I do not wish
to think, to speak, or write, with moderation." "I wash
my hands of the blood that may be spilled."

If the Constitution really was a "covenant with death,"
as Garrison maintained, then one should escape it as
quickly as possible. Therefore Garrison called for the
secession of the North from the South. Had his advice
been followed, the North would have lost all influence
over the South. Garrison was proud of his commitment to
justice; but the Founders would have said that his
approach promoted injustice. As Frederick Douglass
pointed out, Northern secession would have placed "the
slave system more exclusively under the control of the
slaveholding states." Slavery would have persisted much
longer than it did. The first modern nation based on a
"scientific" theory of a master race might have been the
Confederacy, and not Nazi Germany.

Lincoln was right, and today's consensus is wrong:
America really was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal." Under
the principles of the Declaration and the law of the
Constitution, blacks won their liberty, became equal
citizens, gained the right to vote, and eventually had
their life, liberty, and property equally protected by
the law. But today the founding, which made all of this
possible, is denounced by professors like Paul Finkelman
as unjust and anti-black. Surely that uncharitable
verdict deserves to be reversed.