SLAVERY AND AMERICA'S FOUNDING FATHERS

Peter Radan (7 December 2018)

In an earlier post for this blog (America’s Founding Fathers: Saints or Sinners?) the issue of slavery and the American Constitution was explored. In this post the positions on slavery of America's most prominent Founding Fathers will be examined and assessed.

In 1973, the historian Richard B Morris identified the key Founding Fathers as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington.[1] Given that Washington, Jefferson, and Madison occupied the presidency of the Union for five of its first six presidential terms, and the fact that Washington and Jefferson were two of the four presidents whose likeness was sculpted into the granite face of Mount Rushmore, it is reasonable to assume that their views on slavery were reflective of the dominant view of the ‘peculiar institution’.

Before examining the views of this trio of men, it can be noted that, of Morris’s magnificent seven, only Adams and Hamilton never owned slaves. Although Adams privately voiced the view that slavery was an evil, he did little to oppose or end it. John Ferling, Adams’s biographer, notes that ‘as a lawyer [Adams] occasionally defended slaves, but as a politician he made no effort to loosen the shackles of those in bondage ... [nor did] he ever [speak] out on the issue of slavery in any national forum’.[2]

On the other hand, Hamilton, who also saw the evil in slavery, was an advocate for its gradual abolition. His most notable activity on the slavery was his involvement with The Society for the Promotion of the Manumission of Slaves in New York, whose work was instrumental in that state enacting legislation in 1799 for the gradual abolition of slavery within its boundaries.[3]

Franklin, who, Americans have generally regarded as one of the two ‘gold-standard founding fathers’ - the other being Washington,[4] is largely remembered as being an anti-slavery activist, most notably though his role as president of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. However, in a detailed study of Franklin’s views and activities on the issue of slavery, David Waldstreicher states:

"[Franklin] profited from the domestic and international slave trade, complained about the ease with which slaves and servants ran off to the British army during the colonial wars of the 1740s and 1750s, and staunchly defended slaveholding rebels during the Revolution. He owned a series of slaves between about 1735 and 1781 and never systematically divested himself of them. After 1731 he wrote publicly and regularly on the topics of slavery and racial identity but almost never in a straightforwardly antislavery or antiracist fashion. He declined to bring the matter of slavery to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when asked to do so by the abolition society he served as president".[5]

Jay, who served as America’s first Chief Justice, owned slaves, but was also a prominent member of New York’s Manumission Society. He explained his seemingly contradictory views as follows: ‘I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution’.[6] He freed his slaves in 1798.

George Washington

Washington (one of the largest slave owners in Virginia who then owned more than 100 slaves and controlled almost 200 more that were inherited as dower slaves by his wife[7]), brought slaves with him to the Philadelphia Convention which he chaired and which drafted a Constitution that largely reflected his views as a slaveholder. As Fritz Hirschfeld has noted, ‘[w]hatever Washington may have thought of the slavery issue being debated and decided at the federal convention, it is interesting to note that the proslavery views that found their way into the Constitution were (coincidentally or not) those most compatible with Washington’s own values and beliefs’.[8]

Washington Supervising Slaves at Mount Vernon

As Hirschfeld also points out:

"There is no indication that Washington, at least before the Revolutionary War, was dissatisfied with the institution of slavery - except for economic aspects of the Atlantic slave trade - or harbored any desire to see it changed. On the contrary, available evidence indicates that he was firmly wedded to the social and economic order from which he derived so many material benefits. ... The struggle for black equality was one revolution that [he] would not lead or even join".[9]

Washington's Fugitive Slave Advertisement, 1761

During his presidency, while the capital of the Union was located in Philadelphia, Washington brought a number of slaves to service him and his wife in their official residence. He was vigilant in getting around Pennsylvania’s legislation that stipulated that, after six months continuous residence in that state, a slave became free, by having the slaves that he had with him in Philadelphia do a round trip to Virginia and back each six months.[10] At the end of his term in office, Ona Judge, a slave who served as a personal attendant for his wife escaped. Washington relentlessly, but unsuccessfully, sought her recapture up until his death in 1799.[11] His pursuit of Ona Judge was simply the continuation of his lifelong approach to runaway slaves.

Although Washington did, in private communication, speak of ‘it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery in the Country may be abolished’,[12] he did nothing personally toward that goal until his death, in 1799. By the terms of his will, 123 of the 317 slaves at his Mount Vernon property were given their freedom. The remaining slaves were those inherited as dower slaves by his wife and could not, by law, be freed at that time. However, they were eventually granted their freedom in January 1801.[13]

Thomas Jefferson

In 1776, at the time that Jefferson penned the words of the Declaration of Independence that asserted that ‘all Men are created equal’ and are ‘endowed … with certain unalienable Rights’ such as ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’, he owned 83 slaves.[14]

In his Notes on the State of Virginia,[15] written and published in the 1780s, Jefferson said of African-Americans:

"Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one [black] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous".

He went on the offer the opinion that ‘blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind’.

Although Jefferson professed a hatred of slavery, as Paul Finkelman has observed, this hatred slavery was of a ‘peculiarly cramped kind’. Finkelman elaborates as follows:

"It was not so much slavery he hated as what it did to his society. This ‘hatred’ took three forms. First, he hated what slavery did to whites. Second, he hated slavery because he feared it would lead to a rebellion that would destroy his society. Third, he hated slavery because it brought Africans to America and kept them there. None of these feelings motivated him to do anything about the institution".[16]

Jefferson’s hatred of slavery, did not preclude him from active participation in the interstate slave trade.[17] Furthermore, he recognized what he called the ‘silent profit’ from reproduction by slaves. Thus, in 1792 he wrote approvingly to Washington recommending that ‘every farthing … in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5 to 10 per cent’.[18]

On his death, in 1826 - fifty years to the day after the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence - Jefferson’s will stipulated that five of his slaves be granted their freedom. Soon after his death, the remaining 130 slaves that he owned were sold to help pay off the substantial debts Jefferson owed when he died.

James Madison

At the Philadelphia Convention that drifted the Constitution Madison referred to slavery as ‘the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.’[19] However, for Madison, as Noah Feldman has observed, although ‘[t]he principle of abolition might be good, but the reality was not to be taken seriously’.[20]

Madison had a deeply held fear of the disastrous consequences of slave insurrections as was demonstrated during the Constitution’s ratification when he wrote of slaves as ‘an unhappy species of population abounding in some of the States, who during the calm of regular government are sunk below the level of men; but who, in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into the human character, and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves’.[21]

Although Madison expressed a desire that the evil of slavery end, it was on condition that once freed, negroes had to be removed from the United States.[22] This approach was grounded in Madison’s belief that ‘[t]he two races cannot co-exist, being free & equal’.[23]

Unlike Washington and Jefferson, who had provided for the freedom of some of their slaves in their wills, Madison did not. Rather he left them to his wife, with permission to give them their freedom. She did not do so, opting to sell them to pay off debts.[24]

Conclusion

Notwithstanding the assertions of Declaration of Independence that ‘all Men are created equal’ and are ‘endowed … with certain unalienable Rights’ such as ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’, the Founding Fathers failed to live up to them.

As Richard Bernstein notes, to this day Americans continue to debate the question of ‘why the founding fathers failed to confront the central moral and constitutional issue of their era: chattel slavery and its attendant implications for issues of race and equality’.[25]

Perhaps the most compelling answer to this question is that, although men such as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison admitted the moral evil of slavery and, in the words of Noah Feldman, ‘felt ashamed of their association with slavery’:

"[t]hey just did not feel sufficiently ashamed to do anything about it, at least not while their livelihoods and those of their families depended upon the labor of enslaved persons. They could compromise on slavery in the constitution – because they always compromised on slavery in their own lives".[26]

REFERENCES

[1] Richard B Morris, Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries, Harper & Row, 1973.

[2] John Ferling, John Adams: A Life, Henry Holt, 1992, 172-3

[3] Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, Head of Zeus, 2017, 214-6, 581.

[4] R B Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, 2009, 142.

[5] David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution, Hill & Wang, 2004, xii-xiii.

[6] Quoted in ‘Jay and Slavery’ at: <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/dev/jay/JaySlavery.html>.

[7] Edward J Larson, The Return of George Washington, 1783-1789, William Morrow, New York, 2014, 103.

[8] Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal, University of Missouri Press, 1997, 177.

[9] ibid, 227, 236.

[10] Fergus M Bordewich, The First Congress, How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017, 276.

[11] Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught, The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, Atria Books, 2017.

[12] Quoted in Hirschfeld, note 8 above, 237.

[13] <https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/>.

[14] Kenneth C Davis, In the Shadow of Liberty, The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives, Henry Holt & Company, 2016, 145.

[15] See extracts at: <http://historytools.davidjvoelker.com/sources/Jefferson-Race.pdf>.

[16] Paul Finkelman, ‘Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery: The Myth Goes On’ (1994) 102The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography193 at 203.

[17] Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, A History of Abolition, Yale University Press, 2016, 90.

[18] Quoted in Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Harvard University Press, 2018, 130.

[19] Max Farrand (ed), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Revised Edition in Four Volumes, Volume 1, Yale University Press, 1966, 135.

[20] Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President, Random House, 2017, 69.

[21] ‘The Federalist No 43 (Madison)’ in Terence Ball (ed), Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist with Letters of ‘Brutus’, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 213-214.

[22] James Madision, ‘Letter to Robert J Evans’, 15 June 1819, in Gaillard Hunt (ed), The Writings of James Madison, Vol VIII,1808-1819, G P Putnam’s Sons, 1908, 440.

[23] James Madison, ‘To Marquis de Lafayette’, November 1826, in Gaillard Hunt (ed),The Writings of James Madison, Vol IX, 1819-1836, G P Putnam’s Sons, 1910, 265.

[24] <https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/james-madison>.

[25] R B Bernstein, note 4 above, 10.

[26] Feldman, note 20 above, 164.