Founding Brothers (15 page)

Speaking
of promises, a “sacred compact” had been made when the nation was
founded in 1787, “a compact which brought us together mutually to
relinquish a share of our interests to preserve the remainder.” Then
Jackson described the Sectional Compromise at the Constitutional Convention,
whereby “the southern states for this very principle gave into what might
be termed the navigation law of the eastern and western states,” a
concession granted in return for retention of the slave trade for twenty years.
The Quaker petitioners were now asking the Congress to break that compact and
thereby violate the understanding on which the states of the Deep South had
entered the union.

Moreover, there was an even more elemental
understanding implicitly codified in Philadelphia but actually predating the
Constitutional Convention by many years. It was rooted in the realistic
recognition that slavery had been grafted onto the character of the southern
states during the colonial era and had become a permanent part of American
society south of the Potomac. “If it were a crime, as some assert but
which I deny,” Jackson explained, “the British nation is answerable
for it, and not the present inhabitants, who now hold that species of property
in question.” Northern posturing on this matter was insufferable, as
Jackson saw it, since their oozing arguments transformed a geographic accident
and a product of historical circumstance into a willful sin. The
incontrovertible truth was that slavery was “one of those habits
established long before the Constitution, and could not now be remedied.”
When the thirteen colonies rebelled against Britain, “no one raised this
question.” And when the nation was formed into a more unified whole in
1787, “the Union had received them with all the ill habits about
them.” The implicit but thoroughly understood sectional agreement, which
the Sectional Compromise at Philadelphia merely underlined, was that slavery,
while anomalous within the framework of republican ideology, was a self-evident
reality that had been allowed to coexist alongside Jefferson’s
self-evident truths. “The custom, the habit of slavery is
established,” Jackson observed, and all responsible American statesmen
had agreed that “the southern states must be left to themselves on this
subject.” Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better
world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation
in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and
therefore too true to be good. Jackson did not go so far as to argue, as did
southern apologists two or three generations later, that slavery was “a
positive good.” But he did insist, in nonnegotiable language, that it was
“a necessary evil.”

Jackson had several books at his side,
and he began to read to his colleagues in order to demonstrate that his
opinions were shared by the most respected authorities. The most respected
authority of all, the Christian God in the Bible, sanctioned slavery in several
passages from the Old Testament. In addition, the most reliable and recent
studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing
custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were
simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience,
probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country.

Then
Jackson referred his colleagues to the opinions of “Mr. Jefferson, our
secretary of state,” and began reading from Jefferson’s
Notes
on the State of Virginia
on the practical question: “What is to be
done with the slaves when freed?” Either they must be incorporated where
they are or they must be colonized somewhere else. Jefferson’s view of
the question was so well known that Jackson claimed he could quote from
Jefferson’s book from memory: The two races cannot live together on equal
terms because of “deep rooted prejudices entertained by the
whites—ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have
sustained—new provocations—the real distinctions that nature has
made, and many other circumstances which divide us into parties, and produce
convulsions which would never end but with the extermination of one or the
other race.” Perhaps there were a few whites in the North who did not
concur with Mr. Jefferson’s sentiments. Perhaps the Quaker petitioners
approved of racial mixing and looked forward to “giving their daughters
to negro sons, and receiving the negro daughters for their sons.” But
despite the relatively small size of the black population in the North, the
pattern of racial segregation there suggested that most northern whites shared
Jefferson’s belief that “incorporation” was unlikely. In the
South, where the number of blacks was so much larger, it was unthinkable.

Those advocating emancipation, then, need to confront the intractable
dilemma posed by the sheer size of an African population that, once freed, must
be removed to some other location. Apart from the obvious question of cost,
which would prove astronomically high, where could the freed blacks be sent?
Those advocating an African solution might profitably study the recent English
efforts to establish a black colony in Sierra Leone, where most of the freed
blacks died or were enslaved by the local African tribes. Those advocating a
location in the American West also needed to think again: “The peoples of
America, like an overwhelming torrent, are rapidly covering the earth, and
extending their settlements throughout this vast continent, nor is there any
spot, however remote, but a short period will settle.” Moreover, vast
tracts in the West had already been promised to the Indians, whose response to
a population of black neighbors was likely to prove uncharitable in the
extreme. If anyone had a responsible solution to this problem, Jackson claimed
to be receptive. But until such a solution materialized, all talk of
emancipation must cease.
³²

No one from
outside the Deep South rose to answer Jackson. The next day, March 17, William
Loughton Smith held the floor for over two hours without interruption and
repeated most of Jackson’s points. Whereas Jackson tended toward a more
volatile and pulpit-thumping style reminiscent of an itinerant Presbyterian
minister in the revivalistic mode, Smith preferred the more measured cadences
of the South Carolina aristocrat steeped in Ciceronian formalities. But despite
the stylistic differences, the arguments were identical: The Constitution was
absolutely clear that the slave trade could not be ended before 1808; there was
a sectional compact that recognized slavery’s existence where it was
already rooted south of the Potomac; any attempt to renegotiate that compact
would mean the dissolution of the union; the demographic and racial realities
rendered any emancipation scheme impossible, most especially for white
southerners who lived amid a sizable black population. Smith also quoted from
Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia,
then put his own
cast on the racial implications of a large free-black population in America:
“If the blacks did not intermarry with the whites, they would remain
black until the end of time; for it was not contended that liberating them
would whitewash them; if they did intermarry with the whites, then the white
race would be extinct, and the American people would all be of the mulatto
breed. In whatever light therefore the subject was viewed, the folly of
emancipation was manifest.”
³³

The full
proslavery argument was now out in the open. If one looked forward from this
dramatic moment, the speeches by Jackson and Smith became prophetic previews of
coming attractions for the southern defense of slavery in the nineteenth
century, a defense that would eventually lose on the battlefields of the Civil
War. If one looked backward, nothing quite so defiant or systematic had ever
been presented before. True enough, the constitutional arguments represented a
consolidation of points made in Philadelphia in 1787 and then in several state
ratifying conventions. But the brazen claim that slavery must be accepted
unconditionally as a permanent feature of the national confederation was, if
not wholly new, at least an interpretive clarification never made before in a
national forum. And the racial argument, which added the specter of a racially
mixed American society as a consequence of emancipation, gave a new dimension
to the debate by attempting to transform the sectional disagreement between
North and South into a national alliance of whites against blacks.
³⁴

The novelty
of the arguments now pouring forth from the representatives of the Deep South
must also be understood in context. The particulars were new, but the attitudes
on which they rested were familiar. No responsible statesman in the
revolutionary era had ever contemplated, much less endorsed, a biracial
American society. In 1776, for example, when the Continental Congress had
commissioned John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to design a
seal for the United States, they produced a national emblem depicting Americans
of English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, and Dutch extraction. There were
no Africans or Native Americans in the picture. The new proslavery argument,
then, drew on assumptions about the white Anglo-Saxon character of the emerging
American nation that were latent but long-standing. No explicit articulation of
those assumptions had been necessary in a national forum before 1790, because
no frontal assault on slavery had been made that required a direct or
systematic response.

Those historians who claim that a distinctive
racial ideology first came into existence at this time, describing it as a
fresh “construction” or “invention” designed to frame
the debate over slavery in a more effectively prejudicial way, have a point, or
perhaps half a point, in the sense that the challenge to slavery drove the
racial (and racist) presumptions to the surface of the debate for the first
time. But they had been lurking in the hearts and minds of the revolutionary
generation all along. The ultimate legacy of the American Revolution on slavery
was not an implicit compact that it be ended, or a gentlemen’s agreement
between the two sections that it be tolerated, but rather a calculated
obviousness that it not be talked about at all. Slavery was the unmentionable
family secret, or the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room. What was
truly new in the proslavery argument was not really the ideas or attitudes
expressed, but the expression itself.
³⁵

There was
yet another new ingredient about to enter the debate in 1790, though it too was
more a matter of making visible and self-conscious what had previously hovered
in some twilight zone of hazy and unspoken recognition. Perhaps the least
controversial decision of the First Congress was passage of legislation that
authorized the census of 1790, an essential item because accurate population
figures were necessary to determine the size of state delegations in the House.
The following information was being gathered, quite literally, while the debate
over the Quaker petitions raged:

At the most obvious level, these numbers confirmed with
enhanced precision the self-evident reality that slavery was a sectional
phenomenon that was dying out in the North and flourishing in the South. The
exceptions were New York and New Jersey, which, not incidentally, remained the
only northern states to resist the passage of gradual emancipation laws. In
general, then, there was a direct and nearly perfect correlation between
demography and ideology—that is, between the ratio of blacks to whites in
the population and the reluctance to consider abolition. When the proslavery
advocates of the Deep South unveiled their racial argument—What will
happen between the races after emancipation?—the census of 1790 allowed
one to predict the response with near precision. Wherever the black population
reached a threshold level, slavery remained the preferred means of assuring the
segregation of the races.

The only possible exception to this rule was
the Upper South, to include the states of Maryland, Virginia, and North
Carolina. There the slave populations were large, in Virginia very large
indeed, but so were the populations of free blacks (“All Other Free
Persons”). From a strictly demographic perspective, Virginia was almost
as vulnerable to the specter of postemancipation racial fears as South
Carolina, but the growing size of the free-black population accurately
reflected the presence of multiple schemes for gradual emancipation within the
planter class and the willingness of at least a few slave owners to act in
accord with the undeniable logic of the American Revolution. The sheer size of
Virginia’s total population, amplified by the daunting racial ratio, and
then further amplified by the political prowess of its leadership at the
national level, all combined to make it the key state. If any national plan for
ending slavery was to succeed, Virginia needed to be in the vanguard.