Joseph J. Ellis (45 page)

21.
The Madison quotation is from the debates at the Constitutional Convention (28 June 1787) in Max Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1/8/
, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1937), vol. 1, 486–487. The most succinct recent study of the role of slavery at the convention is Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders
, 1–33. The groundbreaking scholarly analysis is Staughton Lynd, ed.,
Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays
(Indianapolis, 1967). The most comprehensive assessment within the larger context of “original intent” is Jack N. Rakove,
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
(New York, 1996), 58, 70–74, 90–93.

22.
Records
, vol. 2 221–223, 364–365, 396–403.

23.
Records
, vol. 1, 605; vol. 2, 306.

24.
Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders
, 34–57, for the most recent scholarly assessment of the Northwest Ordinance, which emphasizes its inherent ambiguity. A more optimistic interpretation is suggested in William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,”
AHR
77 (1972): 81–93. See also Peter Onuf, “From Constitution to Higher Law: The Reinterpretation of the Northwest Ordinance,”
Ohio History
94 (1985): 5–33.

25.
Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders, 1
9–31; Rakove,
Original Meanings
, 85–89.

26.
Jonathan Elliot, ed.,
The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution
, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896), vol. 2, 41, 149, 484.

27.
Elliot, ed.,
Debates
, vol. 4, 286.

28.
McColley,
Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia
, 120, 163–190. For Madison’s remark on the three-fifths clause, see Clinton Rossiter, ed.,
The Federalist Papers
(New York, 1961), 338–339.

29.
Elliot, ed.,
Debates
, vol. 3, 273, 452–453, 598–599. An excellent overview of the larger set of issues raised by the ambiguity of the Constitution on slavery is William Wiecek,
The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1/60–1840
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1977).

30.
First Congress
, vol. 12, 649–662.

31.
This is a large claim, but it is rooted in the evidence (coming up in the next few pages) and in keeping with the best scholarly overview of the subject by Larry Tise,
Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840
(Athens, Ga., 1987).

32.
First Congress
, vol. 12, 719–721, 725–735.

33.
Ibid., 750–761.

34.
Tise,
Proslavery
, 97–123, which claims that even the “positive good” argument was part of the Deep South’s position in the revolutionary era. I cannot go quite that far, even though the Deep South did argue that Africans actually preferred slavery to impoverished freedom or to life in Africa. What is missing in the revolutionary era, however, is the claim that the conditions of life for slaves in the South were preferable to the conditions for factory workers in the North, which would have been a historic impossibility, since factories had yet to appear. The late-eighteenth-century proslavery position, I believe, was more defensive. See, for example, Eric R. Papenfuse,
The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery
(Philadelphia, 1997), and John P. Kaminski, ed.,
A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution
(Madison, 1994).

35.
The most elegant argument for the creation of a distinctive racial ideology in this period is Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,”
New Left Review
181 (1990): 95–118. The magisterial argument for the long-standing existence of racial attitudes and convictions is Jordan,
White Over Black
. What I am attempting to argue here is that a coherent or explicit racial ideology had been unnecessary before this period, because slavery institutionalized the presumption of white Anglo-Saxon superiority and rendered an explicit or systematic racial ideology superfluous. Just as the most virulent racial legislation in American history appeared after slavery was ended in the late nineteenth century, the most potent racial arguments surfaced when slavery was threatened in the late eighteenth century. But the underlying values on which all the formal arguments and laws were based had been present for centuries. For a discussion of the racial implications of the proposed seal for the United States, see Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics
, 135.

36.
The phrase about “revolutionary time” is from Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
, 306. On the one hand, Davis’s book remains the most sophisticated and comprehensive assessment of the extended historical moment when the fate of slavery seemed to hang in the balance after the Revolution. On the other hand, because it considers the fifty-year period as a single piece, the patterns within the period are blurred into the larger whole and the inevitability of the eventual failure shadows the entire survey. The strongest case for the viability of a national antislavery program is Nash,
Race and Revolution
, which emphasizes the historic opportunity without putting a specific date on the closing of that opportunity, but which ignores altogether the powerful forces confronting any antislavery initiative and then makes the rather bizarre claim that the chief responsibility, even culpability, for the failure rests with the North. The argument here, which strikes me as incontrovertible, is that the key was Virginia.

37.
The Fairfax and Tucker plans are conveniently reprinted in Nash,
Race and Revolution, 1
46–165. The best analysis of the components contained in all
gradual emancipation plans coming out of Virginia is Jordan,
White Over Black
, 555–567.

38.
Robinson,
Slavery in the Structure of American Politics
, 6–8, offers the most specific economic estimates and the clearest negative judgment, concluding that “slavery could not have been eliminated by political processes during the founding period.” Nash,
Race and Revolution
, 5–6, 20, offers no economic evidence that emancipation was feasible, but it assumes the failure to take decisive action was moral and political, emphasizing the lack of leadership in the North, thereby implying the costs were not prohibitive. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” 76–84, takes a more circumspect middle course, providing no systematic economic argument but suggesting that the combination of political, economic, and racial factors converged to limit the options and virtually assure that slavery would persist. For Jefferson’s backward evolution from the vanguard to the rear guard of the antislavery movement, see Ellis,
American Sphinx, 1
46–152.

39.
The Tucker plan, for example, would have freed only female slaves at twenty-eight years of age, then their children when they reached the same age. (The gradual emancipation plans adopted in New York and New Jersey had analogous provisions, designed to stagger the effect of liberation as well as the costs.) Tucker emphasized the time delay as a central feature of his plan, which was cost-free to the present generation. He did not provide specific estimates of the compensation levels, and my own estimate of the size of the sinking fund, about $50 million, is no more than an educated guess. Nevertheless, my estimate is designed to expose the realistic economic parameters implicit in the most practical of the available plans. Perhaps there should have been a sliding compensation scale that encouraged earlier emancipations by rewarding slave owners who acted before the legal deadline.

40.
Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” 83, makes the same point even more assertively: “no such color-blind, ethnically-blind, gender-blind social order had ever existed, not on these shores, not anywhere else.”

41.
P. J. Staudenraus,
The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865
(New York, 1961), is the standard history. See also George M. Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 181/–1114
(New York, 1971). Of all the prominent statesmen at the time, Madison gave the African option the most thought. For an elegant summary of this thinking, see Drew McCoy,
The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy
(Cambridge, 1989), 279–283.

42.
The great Franklin biography remains Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
(New York, 1938). The best recent biography is Esmond Wright,
Franklin of Philadelphia
(Cambridge, 1986). For Franklin’s contribution as a scientist, see I. Bernard Cohen,
Science and the Founding Fathers
(New York, 1995), 135–195. The classic effort to undermine Franklin’s historical reputation is D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in
Classic American Literature
(New York, 1924), 15–27. On the changing images of Franklin, see Nian-Sheng Huang,
Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture
(Philadelphia, 1994). A perceptive appraisal of Franklin’s character emerges in Robert Middlekauf,
Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies
(Berkeley, 1996). And these scholarly sources are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For Jefferson’s ranking of Franklin as next to Washington, with all others “on the second line,” see Jefferson to William Carmichael, 12 August 1788, Boyd, vol. 13, 502.

43.
For Franklin’s early career in Pennsylvania politics, see William Hanna,
Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics
(Stanford, 1964). For his English phase, see Verner W. Crane,
Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775
(Chapel Hill, 1950). For his Parisian phase, see Claude-Ann Lopez,
Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris
(New Haven, 1990).

44.
Records
, vol. 3, 361, for Franklin’s antislavery petition at the Constitutional Convention. Tench Coxe was the member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society who urged him to withdraw the petition on the grounds that “it would be a very improper season & place to hazard the Application” (quoted in Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
, 321).

45.
Albert H. Smyth, ed.,
The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 1
0 vols. (New York, 1907), vol. 10, 87–91.

46.
First Congress
, vol. 12, 809–810, 812–822, 825–827.

47.
Of all the prominent statesmen who chose to regard silence as the highest form of leadership at this moment, Washington is the most intriguing, in part because he was the largest slave owner (over three hundred slaves lived on his several plantations), and in part because he, perhaps alone, possessed the stature to have altered the political context if he had chosen to do so. The Washington quotation is from Washington to John Mercer, 9 September 1786, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed.,
The Writings of George Washington
, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931–1944), vol. 29, 5. See also Fritz Hirschfeld,
George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal
(St. Louis, 1997). For a conversation with the editors of the modern edition of the Washington papers on this topic, see Sarah Booth Conroy,
Washington Post
, February 16, 1998. Of course, Washington was the supreme example in the founding generation of what John Adams called “the gift of silence.” In hindsight, this was one occasion when one could only have wished that the gift had failed him.

48.
Madison to Edmund Randolph, 21 March 1790; Madison to Benjamin Rush, 20 March 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 109–110.

49.
Madison to Rush, 20 March 1790; Thomas Pleasants, Jr., to Madison, 10 July 1790; Madison to Robert Pleasants, 30 October 1791, Rutland, vol. 13, 109, 271, vol. 14, 117. See also McColley,
Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia
, 182.

50.
Madison to Rush, 20 March 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 109. The shrewdest assessment of Madison’s inherently equivocal thinking about slavery is McCoy,
The Last of the Fathers
, 217–322.

51.
Madison to Randolph, 21 March 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 110.

52.
First Congress
, vol. 12, 832–844. John Pemberton to James Pemberton, 16 March 1790, quoted in Nash,
Race and Revolution
, 41.

53.
First Congress
, vol. 3, 338–339, for the debate and vote on the committee report.

54.
Ibid., 340–341.

55.
Ibid., 341, for the final version of the resolution. Madison’s comment is from
First Congress
, vol. 12, 842. The Washington quotation is from Washington to David Stuart, 28 March 1790, Fitzpatrick, vol. 31, 28–30.

56.
In the petition of 1792, see
Annals of Congress
, 2d Congress, 2d Session, 728—731. For the Webster comment, see Daniel Webster to John Bolton, 17 May 1833, Charles Wiltse, ed.,
The Papers of Daniel Webster
, 7 vols. (Hanover, N.H., 1974–1986), vol. 3, 252–253.

57.
First Congress
, vol. 3, 375.

  1.
On the Washington mythology, three books provide excellent surveys: Marcus Cunliffe,
George Washington, Man and Monument
(Boston, 1958); Paul Long-more,
The Invention of George Washington
(Berkeley, 1988); Barry Schwartz,
The Making of an American Symbol
(New York, 1987).

  2.
Longmore,
The Invention
, 24; Schwartz,
The Making of an American Symbol
, 127; Richard Brookhiser,
Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington
(New York, 1996), 22–23.