What's So Great About America (15 page)

Refuting the myth that the three-fifths clause degrades black humanity does not absolve the founders of the charge of hypocrisy. We still have to meet Franklin and Taney's argument that the founders claimed to be antislavery while approving a Constitution that permitted the continuation of slavery. Despite Jefferson's impressive fulminations against slavery, the fact remains that he owned some two hundred slaves and did not free them. Does it not follow that the author of “all men are created equal” could not have meant what he said?

It should not be surprising that Jefferson, a Virginia planter, owned slaves; in this he was a man of his time. What is surprising is that, as a southern slave owner, Jefferson made no attempt to justify slavery by contending that it was good for the slave. On the contrary, he repeatedly denounced slavery in the strongest terms. Even if blacks could be shown to be intellectually inferior to
whites, Jefferson denied that this would provide a just basis for their enslavement. “Whatever be their talents, it is no measure of their rights.”
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Jefferson was one of the least religious of the founders, but strikingly he consistently adopted prophetic biblical language in condemning slavery. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
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Given Jefferson's firm repudiation of slavery, a view shared by most of the framers, why didn't these men move rapidly to free their slaves and insist upon a Constitution that would immediately secure equal rights for all? To answer this question, we must understand something about the relationship between slavery and democracy, and about the practical dilemma faced by the framers in Philadelphia.

For millennia, slavery was an accepted part of society. In numerous civilizations both Western and non-Western, slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics. The major religions of the world, including Christianity and Islam, permitted slavery. True, Christianity and Islam both hold that all persons are equal in God's sight. But for centuries this was considered a spiritual truth, inapplicable to the hierarchies of this world. But starting in the seventeenth century, certain segments of Christianity—initially the Quakers, then the evangelical Christians—began to interpret biblical equality as forbidding the ownership of one man by another. Only then, for the first time, did slavery become a political problem.
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Before that, slaves were typically captured in warfare or bought and sold in slave markets, and the greatest thinkers of antiquity condoned slavery. Aristotle distinguished between those who were “slaves by nature,” i.e., those who lacked the mental
capacity to rule themselves, and “slaves by convention,” i.e., those who had the misfortune to be captured and enslaved. While Aristotle did not attempt to defend conventional slavery in terms of justice, he did allow it on grounds of expediency. In every society, he said, there is dirty work to be done, and someone has to do it. If slaves do the hard labor, Aristotle theorized, then there would be leisure for others to engage in higher pursuits like art and philosophy and politics.

In his debate with Abraham Lincoln in the mid–nineteenth century, Stephen Douglas offered a version of the Aristotelian argument in defense of the slave system of the American South. “The civilized world has always held that when any race of men have shown themselves to be so degraded by ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and barbarism, as to be utterly incapable of governing themselves, they must, in the nature of things, be governed by others, by such laws as are deemed to be applicable to their condition.”
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The careful reader will also recognize in this statement echoes of Plato's argument for why the wise should rule.

We might regard Stephen Douglas's argument to be crude and despicable, but Abraham Lincoln did not. He agreed with Douglas: it is absurd to construct a regime in which the foolish are in charge. Thus democracy poses a problem that the American founders and Lincoln all recognized: how can the wise—who are by definition the few—be reliably identified and chosen to rule by the many? Representative government is based on the hope that the majority will exercise their power on behalf of right—that they will choose others to govern who are wiser than themselves. Yet modern democracy introduces a crucial qualification to the claim of the wise to rule: such rule is only legitimate
when it is vindicated by popular consent. The requirement of consent is necessary to ensure that the wise do not rule simply for their own benefit, but also for the benefit of the unwise.

“The only distinction between freedom and slavery,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “consists in this: in the former state, a man is governed by laws to which he has given his consent; in the latter, he is governed by the will of another.”
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Here we can see what the American founders saw instantly: that the argument for democracy and the argument against slavery are one and the same. Both are based on the political doctrine that no man may rule another man without his consent.

S
ince blacks are human beings, slavery is against natural right and should be prohibited. But how? Here is where Jefferson and the founders faced two profound obstacles. The first was that virtually all of them recognized the degraded condition of blacks in America and understood it posed a formidable hurdle to granting blacks the rights of citizenship. By contrast with monarchy and aristocracy, which only require subjects to obey, self-government requires citizens who have the capacity to be rulers. Jefferson and the founders were legitimately concerned that a group that had been enslaved for centuries was not ready to assume the responsibility of democratic self-rule.

Jefferson was also aware of the existence of intense and widespread white prejudices against blacks which, whatever their cause, seemed to prevent the two peoples from coexisting harmoniously on the same soil. Madison, who shared this view,
developed a plan for the U.S. government to raise money to repatriate blacks to Africa. These so-called colonization schemes seem bizarre today, but in the eighteenth century they were supported by many abolitionists, white as well as black. Lincoln himself echoed Jefferson's concerns, and prior to the Civil War he endorsed colonization as a way for blacks to live free and unmolested in a country of their own.

The deference of Jefferson and the American founders to popular prejudices strikes many contemporary scholars as an intellectual and moral scandal. Some, like John Hope Franklin, suggest that popular convictions simply represented a frustrating obstacle that the founders should have dealt with resolutely and uncompromisingly. But in a democratic society, the absence of the people's agreement on a fundamental question of governance is no mere technicality. The case for democracy, no less than the case against slavery, rests on the legitimacy of the people's consent. To outlaw slavery without the consent of the majority of whites would be to destroy democracy, indeed to destroy the very basis for outlawing slavery itself.

The men gathered in Philadelphia were in a peculiar predicament. For them to sanction slavery would be to proclaim the illegitimacy of the American revolution and the new form of government based on the people's consent; yet for them to outlaw slavery without securing the people's consent would have the same effect. In practical terms as well, the choice facing the founders was not to permit or to prohibit slavery. Rather, the choice was either to establish a union in which slavery was tolerated, or not to have a union at all. Any suggestion that the southern states could have been persuaded to join a union and give up slavery can
be dismissed as preposterous. As Harry Jaffa puts it, had the founders insisted upon securing
all
the rights of
all
men, they would have ended up securing
no
rights for
anybody.
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Thus the accusation that the founders compromised on the Declaration's principle that “all men are created equal” for the purpose of expediency reflects a grave misunderstanding. The founders were confronted with a competing principle that is also present in the Declaration: governments derive their legitimacy from the “consent of the governed.” Both principles must be satisfied, and when they cannot be, compromise is not merely permissible but morally required.

The framers found a middle ground, not between principle and practice, but between opposition to slavery and majority consent. They produced a Constitution in which the concept of slavery is tolerated in deference to consent, but not given any moral approval in recognition of the slave's natural rights. Nowhere in the document is the term “slavery” used. Slaves are always described as “persons,” implying their possession of natural rights. The founders were also careful to approve a Constitution that refuses to acknowledge the existence of racial distinctions, thus producing a document that transcended its time.

None of the supposed contradictions that contemporary scholars have located in the founding documents were unrecognized by the founders. Many of the framers justified their toleration of slavery on prudential grounds, for in the 1770s and 1780s they had reason to believe that slavery was losing its commercial appeal. In this they were wrong, because Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (which the founders could not have anticipated) revived the demand for slavery in the South.

Even so, the test of the founders' project is the practical consequence: did the founding strengthen or weaken the institution of slavery? The American Revolution should be judged by its consequences. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every state in America. Yet by 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery either immediately or gradually; southern and border states prohibited further slave importations from abroad; and Congress was committed to outlawing the slave trade in 1808, which it did. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.

Abraham Lincoln not only perceived the founders' dilemma, he inherited it. The principle of popular rule is based on Jefferson's doctrine that “all men are created equal,” yet the greatest crisis in American history arose when the people denied that “all men are created equal” and in so doing denied the basis of their own legitimacy. Lincoln had two choices: work to overthrow democracy, or work to secure consent through persuasion. Conscious that he, too, must defer, as the founders did, to prevailing prejudices, Lincoln nevertheless sought to neutralize those prejudices so they did not become a barrier to securing black freedom. In a series of artfully conditional claims—“If God gave the black man little, that little let him enjoy”—Lincoln paid ritual obeisance to existing racism while drawing even racists into his coalition to end slavery. He made these rhetorical concessions because he knew that the possibility for securing antislavery consent was far better in his time than in the 1780s.

Commenting on the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said of the founders: “They intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They
defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant simply to declare the
right,
so that the
enforcement
of it must follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
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By working through, rather than around, the democratic process, Lincoln justified the nation's faith in the untried experiment of representative self-government. In vindicating the slave's right to rule himself, Lincoln also vindicated the legitimacy of democratic self-rule. Thus it is accurate to say that Lincoln gave America a “new birth of freedom.”

Lincoln's position came to be shared by Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the Constitution but who eventually reached the conclusion that it contained antislavery principles. “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered,” Douglass said. Slavery, he concluded, was merely “scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”
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Douglass came to understand what contemporary multiculturalists apparently do not—that the best antislavery program is not necessarily support for the grandest impractical scheme but rather “is that which deals the deadliest blow upon slavery that can be given at a particular time.”
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It took a civil war to destroy slavery, and more than half a million whites were killed in that war, “one life for every six slaves freed,” C. Vann Woodward reminds us. But for Lincoln as for Douglass, the greatest white and black statesmen of the
time, the triumph of the union and the emancipation of the slaves represented not the victory of might over right, but the reverse. Justice had won out over expediency, and the principles of the American founding had at long last been realized. The founders exercised wisdom and prudence in producing a charter for a society immeasurably better than the one in which they found themselves. History has vindicated their philosophical statesmanship. Black Americans and indeed all of us owe the American founders a profound debt of gratitude.