Wise could insist, without any sense of irony, that “[t]he principle of slavery is a leveling principle; it is friendly to equality. Break down slavery and you would with the same blow break down the great democratic principle of equality among men.” As late as 1864, Congressman Aaron Harding would complain that radical Republicans “are making some progress in giving nominal freedom to the slaves, but equally as much in destroying the liberty of the white race.”
These various ironies did not go unnoticed. “It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, during the war for independence, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” And Lieutenant Enos Reeves left a slave auction in 1782 wondering, “Is this liberty?—Is this the land of liberty I’ve been fighting for these six years?”
Similar sentiments were also expressed at the Philadelphia convention. The slave trade provision of the Constitution, which precluded congressional action to abolish the slave trade until 1808, drew the harshest indictments. William Patterson of New Jersey protested against the “indirect encouragemt of the slave trade; observing that Congs in their act relating to the change of the 8 art: of Confedn had been ashamed to use the term ‘slaves’ & had substituted a description.” Luther Martin of Maryland concurred: “it was inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the Constitution.” George Mason of Virginia maintained that “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country.” John Dickinson of Delaware “considered it as inadmissible on every principle of honor & safety that the importation of slaves should be authorised to the States by the Constitution.” And Madison insisted that “Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.”
In the end, they followed Madison’s lead, at least in form. The slave trade provision remained, and so too did the fugitive slave clause, and so too the much-debated three-fifths clause, which enabled the southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of the census. But the “National character” was not dishonored by the appearance of the terms “slave” or “slavery” anywhere in the federal charter.
The framers, it appears, did indeed take care that the Constitution should not appear to sanction the idea of “property in men.” There is good reason to believe that the framers anticipated that the institution was in decline, and that if the Constitution was merely silent on the matter, slavery would fade into the past. Thus, according to Madison’s notes, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts “thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to Slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it.” Roger Sherman of Connecticut “thought it best to leave the matter as we find it. He observed that the abolition of Slavery seemed to be going on in the United States & that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees compleat it.” Sherman’s Connecticut colleague, Oliver Ellsworth, offered that “slavery in time will not be a speck in our Country. Provision is already made in Connecticut for abolishing it. And the abolition has already taken place in Massachusetts.” Ellsworth did, however, venture that “if it was to be considered in a moral light we ought to go farther and free those already in the Country.” But such appeals were growing wearisome for John Rutledge of South Carolina: “Religion & humanity had nothing to do with this question,” Rutledge insisted. “Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.”11
Whether it was due to morality or self-interest, God or humanity, the effort to free the slaves had already begun. This, perhaps, was the one significant social change to follow the American Revolution. In 1777 Vermont declared slavery inconsistent with natural rights; within a generation, the rest of the North would follow. In 1780 abolitionists in Massachusetts failed in their efforts to ban slavery in that state’s constitution, but the following year, an African slave named Quock Walker argued that any construction of that constitution that authorized slavery was contrary to the law of God. In a fashion, Chief Justice William Cushing of the Massachusetts Supreme Court agreed: the institution of slavery was inconsistent with the constitutional proclamation that “all men are born free and equal.” The rest of New England abolished slavery, and Pennsylvania, long a home to the antislavery Quakers, did as well. New York adopted a plan of gradual manumission, and in 1804 New Jersey became the last state in the North to announce the institution’s demise.
There was also a change in the South. Before the Revolution, slaves were very much at the mercy of their masters: only pecuniary interest ensured their welfare. A 1723 Virginia law, for example, provided that slaves could be punished to the point of death, and any provocation would justify their killing; similarly, a North Carolina law adopted in 1774 punished the willful murder of a slave with just one year in prison. But after the Revolution, southern laws provided greater protection to slaves: by law, at least, they enjoyed the same protection from homicide as that extended to white southerners, with the exception-—not insignificant—of those deaths that were incident to “moderate correction.” As always, the reality did not necessarily match the ideal: “almost all homicides of slaves,” Thomas Morris reports, “from the colonial period to the end of slavery, ended in acquittals, or at most in verdicts of manslaughter, which meant that there had been some legal provocation from the slave.” Still, the implications were both obvious and widely accepted: slaves, like all people, had rights.12 This, of course, only emphasized the contradictions.
The Resolution
In Europe, there was little serious intellectual defense of slavery by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. America’s founding generation, meanwhile, could muster little more than ambivalence. Most of the founders professed—genuinely or not—both moral and intellectual disapproval of slavery; many claimed to feel as enslaved by the institution as those held in actual bondage. Jefferson’s repugnance is well known, and so too Madison’s; even when they advocated the spread of slavery, it was, they claimed, because “diffusion” of the institution would expedite its demise. Adams, meanwhile, favored abolition, and his eldest son, John Quincy, would lead the abolitionist cause in Congress. John Jay was the first president of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves; Hamilton was the second. Hamilton advocated abolition on utilitarian grounds; he believed slavery was unproductive. Franklin urged the same result for reasons that were both scientific—the master-slave hierarchy had no empirical basis—and moral. Washington, meanwhile, found it difficult even to acknowledge the matter. In a 1794 letter to Alexander Spotswood, Washington wrote:
With respect to the other species of property, concerning which you ask my opinion, I shall frankly declare to you that I do not like to even think, much less talk of it. However, as you have put the question I shall, in a few words, give you my ideas of it. Were it not then, that I am principled agt. selling negroes, as you would do cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be possessed of one, as a slave. I shall be happily mistaken, if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ‘ere many years pass over our heads; (but this by the bye).
Three years later, Washington would write from Mount Vernon that “I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery; It would prevt. much future mischief.”
It now seems clear that the founding generation responded to slavery’s paradox largely by postponing the day of reckoning. Most believed, with Washington, that slavery would bring only “mischief”; most hoped, as he did, that the institution would be abolished. They lacked, for the most part, the courage to realize their convictions; but they believed, probably genuinely, that it was only a matter of time. The contradictions would then be resolved by the simple passing of years; their inaction was justified, in their minds, by the obvious inevitability of slavery’s demise.
