Joseph J. Ellis (20 page)

If Franklin’s great gift was an uncanny knack for levitating above political camps, operating at an altitude that permitted him to view the essential patterns and then comment with great irony and wit on the behavior of those groveling about on the ground, Madison’s specialty was just the opposite. He lived in the details and worked his magic in the context of the moment, mobilizing those forces on the ground more adroitly and with a more deft tactical proficiency than anyone else. Taken together, he and Franklin would have made a nearly unbeatable team. But in 1790, they were on different sides.

Madison’s position on slavery captured the essence of what might be called “the Virginia straddle.” On the one hand, he found the blatantly proslavery arguments “shamefully indecent” and described his colleagues from South Carolina and Georgia as “intemperate beyond all example and even all decorum.” Like most of his fellow Virginians, he wanted it known that he preferred an early end to the slave trade and regarded the institution of slavery “a deep-rooted abuse.” He claimed to be genuinely embarrassed at the stridently proslavery rhetoric of the delegates from the Deep South and much more comfortable on the high moral ground of his northern friends.
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But a fault line ran through the center of his thinking, a kind of mysterious region where ideas entered going in one direction but then
emerged headed the opposite way. For example, when urged by Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and abolitionist, to support the Quaker petitions in the House, Madison responded, “Altho I feel the force of many of your remarks, I can not embrace the idea to which they lead.” When pressed to explain the discrepancy between his hypothetical antislavery position and his actual dedication to self-imposed paralysis, he tended to offer several different answers. Sometimes it was a matter of his Virginia constituents: “Those from whom I derive my public station,” he explained, “are known by me to be greatly interested in that species of property, and to view the matter in that light.” Sometimes it was a matter of timing: He concurred with the progressive segment of Virginia’s planter class that “slavery is a Moral, and political Evil, and that Whoever brings forward in the Respective States, some General, rational and Liberal plan, for the Gradual Emancipation of Slaves, will deserve Well of his Country—yet I think it was very improper, at this time, to introduce it in Congress.”
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Any effort to locate the core of Madison’s position on slavery, therefore, misses the point, which is that there was no core, except perhaps the conviction that the whole subject was taboo. Like Jefferson and the other members of the Virginia dynasty, he regarded any explicit defense of slavery in the mode of South Carolina and Georgia as a moral embarrassment. On the other hand, he regarded any effort to end slavery as premature, politically impractical, and counterproductive. As a result, he developed a way of talking and writing about the problem that might be described as “enlightened obfuscation.” For example, consider the following Madisonian statement, written during the height of the debate in the House: “If this folly did not reproach the public councils, it ought to excite no regret in the patrons of Humanity & freedom. Nothing could hasten more the progress of these reflections & sentiments which are secretly undermining the institution which this mistaken zeal is laboring to secure agst. the most distant approach of danger.” The convoluted syntax, multiple negatives, indefinite antecedents, and masterful circumlocutions of this statement defy comprehension. What begins as a denunciation of those defending slavery somehow doubles back on itself and ends up in worrisome confusion that the matter is being talked about at all. What is meant to sound like an antislavery argument transforms itself in
midpassage into a verbal fog bank that descends over the entire subject like a cloud.
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In the midst of this willful confusion, one Madisonian conviction shone through with his more characteristic clarity—namely, that slavery was an explosive topic that must be removed from the political agenda of the new nation. It was taboo because it exposed the inherent contradictions of the Virginia position, which was much closer to the position of the Deep South than Madison wished to acknowledge, even to himself. And it was taboo because, more than any other controversy, it possessed the political potential to destroy the union. Franklin wanted to put slavery onto the national agenda before it was too late to take decisive action in accord with the principles of the Revolution. Madison wanted to take slavery off the national agenda because he believed that decisive action would result in the destruction of either the Virginia planter class or the nation itself. (In the minds of many Virginians, the two items were synonymous.) “The true policy of the Southern members,” he explained to a fellow Virginian, “was to let the affair proceed with as little noise as possible.” The misguided representatives of the Deep South had spoiled that strategy. Now Madison resolved to seize the opportunity created by their threats of secession to put Congress on record as rejecting any constitutional right by the federal government to end slavery. It was the South Carolina solution achieved in the Virginia style.
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T
HE ESSENCE
of that style was indirection. Madison was its master, so deft behind the scenes and in unrecorded conversations that his most significant political achievements, including his impact on the eventual shape of the Constitution and his enduring influence on the thought and behavior of Thomas Jefferson, remain forever hidden, visible only in the way that one detects the movement of iron filings within a magnetic field. The Madisonian influence revealed itself in the House debate of March 23 when the committee report came up for a vote.

Something had changed. Several northern members, who had previously sided with the Quaker petitioners, now expressed their regret that the matter had gotten out of hand. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts wondered out loud why the House had allowed itself to be drawn into
a debate over “abstract propositions” and now urged that the committee report be tabled. Jackson rose to thank Ames and his northern colleagues for seeing the light and recovering the old conciliatory spirit that had once permitted northern and southern interests to cooperate. One of the Quaker petitioners in the gallery, John Pemberton, noted in his diary that some kind of sectional bargain had obviously been struck: “It was a matter of scratch me and I will scratch thee.” (Pemberton surmised that a secret deal had been arranged whereby Massachusetts would align itself with the Deep South on the slavery issue in return for southern support on assumption. If so, Jefferson’s dinner party the following June was the culmination of an even more complicated sectional negotiation than previously realized.) But all claims about what had gone on behind the scenes are conjectural. Madison seldom left footprints.
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The goal of the Deep South, now with support from Massachusetts and Virginia, was to have the committee report tabled, again threatening that further debate would risk disunion, which William Loughton Smith likened to “heaving out an anchor to windward.” Madison, however, wanted more than just an end to the debate. He wished to establish a precedent that clarified the constitutional ambiguities concerning the power of Congress over slavery. Therefore he welcomed the positive vote (29 to 25) to accept the committee report (details of which forthcoming), because he had resolved to use the occasion to establish a constitutional precedent. In the twentieth century, what Madison aimed to achieve would have required a decision by the Supreme Court. But in 1790 the Supreme Court was a woefully weak third branch of the federal government and the principle of judicial review had yet to be established. Madison wanted to use the vote on the committee report to create the equivalent of a landmark decision prohibiting any national scheme for emancipation.
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It happened just as he desired. The committee report consisted of seven resolutions that addressed this salient question: What are “the powers vested in Congress, under the present constitution, relating to the abolition of slavery”? The first resolution was designed to appease the Deep South by confirming that the Constitution prohibited any federal legislation limiting or ending the slave trade until 1808. The fourth was a gesture toward the northern interests, authorizing Congress to levy a tax on slave imports designed to discourage the practice
without prohibiting it. The seventh was a nod toward the Quaker petitioners, declaring that “in all cases, to which the authority of Congress extends, they will exercise it for the humane objects of the memorialists, so far as they can be promoted on the principles of justice, humanity and good policy.” But what did this deliberately vague promise mean? Specifically, how far did the authority of Congress extend? The implicit answer was in the second resolution. It read: “That Congress, by a fair construction of the Constitution, are equally restrained from interfering in the emancipation of slaves, who already are, or who may, within the period mentioned, be imported into, or born within any of the said States.”
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This was the key provision. In keeping with the compromise character of the committee report, it gave the Deep South the protection it had demanded by denying congressional authority to pass any gradual emancipation legislation. But it also set a chronological limit to this moratorium. The prohibition would only last “within the period mentioned”—that is, until 1808. In effect, the committee report extended the deadline for the consideration of emancipation to bring it into line with the deadline for the end of the slave trade. The Deep South would get its way, but only for a limited time. After 1808, Congress possessed the authority to do what it wished; then all constitutional restraints would lapse.

At this decisive moment, the Madisonian magic worked its will. The House went into committee of the whole to revise the language of the report. In parliamentary maneuverings of this sort, Madison had no peer. The Virginia delegation had already received its marching orders to mobilize behind an amended version of the report. And several northern delegations, chiefly those of Massachusetts and New York, had clearly been lobbied to support the amendments, though no one will ever know what promises were made. In the end, the seven resolutions were reduced to three. The tax on the slave trade was dropped altogether, as was the seventh resolution, with its vague declaration of solidarity with the benevolent goals of the Quaker petitioners. The latter gesture had become irrelevant because of the new language of the second resolution. It now read: “The Congress have no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of the States; it remaining with the several States alone to provide any regulation therein, which humanity and true policy may
require.” During the debate over this language, Madison provided the clearest gloss on its fresh meaning by explaining that, instead of imposing an eighteen-year moratorium on congressional action against slavery, the amendment made it unconstitutional “to attempt to manumit them at any time.” The final report passed by the House in effect placed any and all debate over slavery as it existed in the South out of bounds forever. What had begun as an initiative to put slavery on the road to extinction had been transformed into a decision to extinguish all federal plans for emancipation. By a vote of 29 to 25 the House agreed to transcribe this verdict in the permanent record. A relieved George Washington wrote home to a Virginia friend that “the slave business has at last [been] put to rest and will scarce awake.”
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As usual, Washington was right. Congress had moved gradual emancipation off its political agenda; its decision in the spring of 1790 became a precedent with the force of common law. In November of 1792, for example, when another Quaker petition came forward under the sponsorship of Fisher Ames, William Loughton Smith referred his colleague to the earlier debate of 1790. The House had then decided never again to allow itself to become inflamed by the “mere rant and rhapsody of a meddling fanatic” and had argued “that the subject would never be stirred again.” The petition was withdrawn. Over forty years later, in 1833, Daniel Webster cited the same precedent: “My opinion of the powers of Congress on the subject of slaves and slavery is that Congress has no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves. This was so resolved by the House in 1790 … and I do not know of a different opinion since.”
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Whatever window of opportunity had existed to complete the one glaring piece of unfinished business in the revolutionary era was now closed. As noted earlier, perhaps the window, if in fact there ever was a window, had already closed by 1790, so the debate and decision in the House merely sealed shut what the formidable combination of racial demography, Anglo-Saxon presumptions, and entrenched economic interests had already foreclosed. Over two hundred years after the event, it is still not possible to demonstrate conclusively that Madison’s understanding of the political priorities was wrong, or that the pursuit of Franklin’s priorities would not have dismembered the American republic at the moment of its birth. Perhaps it was inevitable, even preferable, that slavery as a national problem be moved from the Congress
to the churches, where it could come under scrutiny as a sin requiring a national purging, rather than as a social dilemma requiring a political solution. That, in any event, is what happened.

One can only speculate on what thought and feelings went streaking through the conscience of James Madison after the fleeting moment passed. Madison understood better than most what was at stake in the debate over slavery. He knew what the American Revolution had promised, that slavery violated that promise, and that Franklin had gone to his Maker reminding all concerned that silence was a betrayal of the revolutionary legacy. During the memorial service in Franklin’s honor on April 22, Madison rose to deliver the final tribute of the House: