Joseph J. Ellis (17 page)

Meanwhile, down in South Carolina the assurances afforded slavery that so troubled Martin of Maryland struck many delegates as inadequate. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney helped win the day for ratification with his own gloss on the true meaning of the compact:

The fullest and most intellectually interesting debate occurred in Virginia. As the most populous state with both the largest slave population (292,000) and the largest free-black population (12,000), Virginia’s demographic profile looked decidedly southern. Only South Carolina had a higher density of blacks (60 percent to Virginia’s 40 percent). But Virginia’s rhetorical posture sounded distinctly northern; or perhaps more accurately, the political leadership of the Old Dominion relished its role as the chief spokesman for “the principles of ’76,” which placed slavery under a permanent shadow and seemed to align Virginia against the Deep South. Jefferson, it must be remembered, had proposed the abolition of slavery in all the western territories. Madison, though he eventually endorsed the three-fifths clause, acknowledged his discomfort with the doctrine, confessing that “it may appear to be a little strained in some points.” Most significantly, the Virginians were adamantly opposed to the continuation of the slave trade. Both Madison and his colleague George Mason denounced the Sectional Compromise in the Constitutional Convention that prolonged the trade; and Mason eventually voted against ratification in part for that very reason. On the surface, at least, Virginia seemed the one southern state
where the ideological contagion of the American Revolution remained sufficiently potent to dissolve the legacy of slavery.
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Upon closer examination, however, Virginia turned out to resemble the fuzzier and more equivocal picture that best describes the nation at large and that the Constitution was designed to mirror. For beneath their apparent commitment to antislavery and their accustomed place in the vanguard of revolutionary principles, the Virginians were overwhelmingly opposed to relinquishing one iota of control over their own slave population to any federal authority. Whether they were living a paradox or a lie is an interesting question. What is undeniably clear is that the Virginia leadership found itself in the peculiar position of acknowledging that slavery was an evil and then proceeding to insist that there was nothing the federal government could do about it. Mason’s vehement opposition to the slave trade rested cheek by jowl with his demand for a constitutional guarantee to protect what he described as “the property of that kind which we have already.”

Virginia’s true position was less principled than it looked. Its plantations were already stocked with slaves, so opposition to the slave trade made economic sense, as did opposition to emancipation. Mason thought that the Constitution had it exactly wrong: “they have done what they ought not to have done”—that is, extended the life of the slave trade—“and have left undone what they ought to have done”—that is, explicitly prohibited federal interference in what he called “our domestic interests.” Edmund Randolph made it abundantly clear at the Virginia ratifying convention just what “domestic interests” Mason had in mind. Randolph in his own roundabout way had come over to support ratification, so he needed to counter Mason’s apprehensions about slavery. “I might tell you,” he apprised his Virginia colleagues,
“that the Southern States, even South Carolina herself
, conceived
this property to be secure,”
and that except for Mason “not a member of the Virginia delegation had
the smallest suspicion of the abolition of slavery.”
Virginia, in short, talked northern but thought southern.
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I
F ONE WISHED
to generalize, then, about the situation that obtained in 1790 at the moment of the congressional debate over the Quaker petitions, the one thing that seemed clear concerning slavery was that nothing was clear at all. The initial debate in February had, in fact,
accurately reflected the competing and incompatible presumptions about slavery’s fate in the American republic, with one side emphasizing the promissory note to end it purportedly issued in 1776, the other side emphasizing the gentlemen’s agreement to permit it reached in 1787, and a middle group, dominated by the Virginians, straddling both sides and counseling moderation lest the disagreement produce a sectional rupture. Both sides could plausibly claim a core strand of the revolutionary legacy as their own. And all parties to the debate seemed to believe that history, as well as the future, was on their side.

Like a lightning flash in the night, the initial exchange on the floor of Congress in February of 1790 had exposed these divisions of opinion before a national audience for the first time. On March 8 the committee was prepared to submit its report, thereby assuring that the controversy would not go away or get buried in some parliamentary graveyard. Representatives from the Deep South rose to express their outrage that the forbidden subject was again being allowed into public view. William Loughton Smith pointed up to the antislavery advocates who had stacked the galleries “like evil spirits hovering over our heads.” James Jackson actually made menacing faces at the Quakers in the gallery, called them outright lunatics, then launched into a tirade so emotional and incoherent that reporters in the audience had difficulty recording his words. The gist seemed to be that any decision to receive the committee report was tantamount to the dissolution of the union.
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These threatening harangues managed to delay matters, but the Deep South lacked the votes. On March 16 the committee was ready to make its report to the House. First Jackson and then Smith were also prepared with their response, which turned out to be the fullest public exposition of the proslavery position yet presented in the United States. In fact, virtually every argument that southern defenders of slavery would mount during the next seventy years of the national controversy, right up to the eve of the Civil War, came gushing forth over the next two days.
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Jackson spoke first and held the floor for about two hours. He could not believe that a dignified body of sober-minded legislators were allowing these “shaking Quakers” with their throbbing consciences to control the national agenda. One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually
acknowledged that his antislavery vision had come to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm. The Congress had been elected to steer the ship of state through rough and uncharted waters, not to take aboard a crew of dazed dreamers bent on sailing to the Promised Land but inadvertently destined to sink the ship on its maiden voyage.

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.
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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.”
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