Slave Nation (27 page)

The “soldiers of the Northwest Ordinance” assured the outcome of the battles that were the turning point in the war.
¹²
At Gettysburg, the Iron Brigade from Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan (formerly parts of the northwest territory) saved the cemetery ridge for the Union Army on the first day.
¹³
On the second day, the First Minnesota Regiment of 262 men plugged a gap in the cemetery ridge line that was attacked by 1,600 Alabamians.
¹⁴
On the third day, Michigan cavalry prevented Stuart’s Confederate cavalry from supporting Picket’s charge.
¹⁵
In the same month, Vicksburg surrendered to troops of General Ulysses S. Grant—a descendant of a Scot who had settled in Massachusetts in 1630. Grant was born in Ohio after it had become the first state to be carved out of the northwest territory.
¹⁶
While he was forcing General Robert E. Lee toward the Appomattox court house on April 9, 1865, three U.S. Colored Infantry Regiments from the Twenty-Fifth U.S. Army Corps, the first army corps made up of black soldiers, were among the seventeen regiments that blocked Lee’s escape route to the west. Of the nearly one hundred eighty thousand black troops that served in the Union Army during the Civil War, at least one hundred thirty-eight thousand were former slaves.
¹⁷

The end of the Civil War meant the end of formal slavery in the United States, but race subordination perpetuated the inferior position of the former slaves and their descendants for a century. This principle was challenged in 1948 when another political figure raised in the “pure air” of the northwest territory—Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota— admonished the Democratic Party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the sunshine of human rights.”
¹⁸
Southerners seceded a third time, this time from the Democratic Party. But their efforts to maintain the remnants of slavery were frustrated in 1964 by two other political figures from the northwest territory, Congressman William McCullough of Ohio and Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who led conservative Republicans to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
¹⁹
The act was given substantive content by yet another northwest territory descendant, Warren Burger of Minnesota, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, in a 1971 opinion which reverberates to this day.
²⁰
His opinion held that the Civil Rights Act was violated by employment practices that screened out a higher proportion of minorities than of whites and were not justified by job-related considerations. This one decision has played a major role in the substantial improvement in both minority and female employment opportunities since then.

The issues of race and slavery played an integral part in the foundation of the republic in 1774 and we have born the brunt of the compromises made to achieve a union ever since. The Declaration of Independence articulated—even if it was not fully pursued or even intended—a vision of equality which has continuously reminded, chided, inspired, and motivated us to seek what we might become.

Benjamin Franklin began the compromises with his solution to the deadlock in Philadelphia that saved the unity of the nation by establishing a principle of freedom that was applied to a third of the territory of the United States. But he did not stop there. In his last foray into public policy, he became president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and designed the first American Affirmative Action Plan to accompany the abolition of slavery. Reading it today, Franklin appears very much ahead of his time. In 1789, on behalf of the society, he wrote the following policy statement:

Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.…To instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employment suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan.

The plan had four components, each to be carried out by a committee of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery.
²¹

The first component was a committee to assist with advice, instructions, and protection from wrongs to the former slaves, concern for their morals, and “other friendly services.” The second was a committee of guardians to facilitate the training and education of children and young people. The third was a committee on education to influence the children to attend “the schools already established in this city, or form others with this view.” And the fourth was a committee of employ, who “shall endeavour to procure constant employment” for laborers and to help them become apprentices in the skilled trades and also “assist in commencing business, such as appears to be qualified for it.”

A comparison of Franklin’s plan with modern equal opportunity employment and affirmative action programs will show the similarity of concern from 1789 to 2004. This comparison demonstrates that these issues have always been actively before the American people in one political form or another. The United States has discussed these issues longer, agonized over them more, legislated about them more, and fought about them more than any other country on earth. We solved the slavery question in blood, one hundred and thirty years ago, and forty years ago embarked on the effort to apply the political concept of equality to social and economic reality. Our struggles demonstrate the difficulties involved. We are the world’s repository of experience in the difficulty of that endeavor.

How then should we view the founding fathers? Historian Gary Nash is highly critical. They should have let South Carolina and Georgia go in 1787. The rest of the nation did not need them. Therefore, the compromises on slavery were unnecessary to the union. Legal historian Paul Finkelman accuses Jefferson of “making a covenant with death.”
²³
Historian William Freehling accuses him of prolonged and unnecessary abdication concerning slavery.
²⁴

Nevertheless, they did settle many principles in their day in ways which we have good cause to applaud. They freed the world from the domination of monarchy, struggled toward a notion of democracy which is still unfolding, embraced principles of intellectual, political, and religious liberty, and made the first inroads on exploitive empire in adopting the “equal-footing” principle for new states. Measured against the magnitude of what they attempted, they succeeded greatly and are to be honored for it. Jefferson deserves particular attention for excluding the word “property” from the Declaration of Independence. Had he included it, it might have sanctified human slavery into an indefinite future. Its substitute, “pursuit of happiness,” is wonderfully open-textured. It encompasses both private greed and the public happiness of participating in a just society. The quest for a just society reaches far back beyond the Scottish philosophers who were Jefferson’s intellectual mentors, back to the Old Testament’s command that “there shall be one law unto you, and unto the stranger who dwelleth within thy gates, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
²⁵
The quotation from James Madison toward the close of this book emphasizes that the driving influence of even the wisest wealthy slave owning political figure,was to widen those gates of which the Old Testament spoke to embrace a larger community.

But the founders did all this on the backs of generations of slaves. By their own standards, they were failures in dealing with slavery. Their actions were based on their view of race. Black slavery was hereditary—white indentured servitude was temporary.

We should honor the men and women of the past for their virtues. Their imperfections and failures both liberate and obligate us to be as creative as they were to mold new—and better—forms of social life. We are as free to shape the principles which they announced to our needs as they shaped eighteenth-century principles to theirs. We are not bit players trapped in a world drama where the greatest achievements took place long before our birth.

We are heirs to the American passion to struggle with the relation between liberty and equality that began in Philadelphia in September, 1774. We have addressed the race problem in a more forthright way than at any time since the Civil War. Our generation has spent forty years struggling to apply the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s which first recognized the right of people of color (and women) to full participation in economic and social affairs. Implementing these acts has sorely tested us all. Our difficulties enable us to better understand the difficulties which confronted those who made the decisions in 1774 and 1787. As they struggled to achieve a new vision of their world, we are doing so in ours. The founders—through the decisions of 1774 through 1787—created tensions that have defined our politics and policies for more than two hundred thirty years.

Understanding that the Revolution was fought, in part, to protect slavery reveals that the southerners who fought the Civil War to preserve the arrangement of 1787 were partly correct: the Constitution, viewed alone, supported slavery. We should acknowledge that fact and perhaps relieve resentments that persist to this day. But by the same token, the Northwest Ordinance banned slavery from a third of our territory. The Constitution would not have been adopted without the ordinance. The burden of continuing to address the race-slavery issue was passed on to succeeding generations, and remains with us today.

Fifty years ago, Gunnar Myrdal called our internal tensions over race the “American Dilemma,” but “passion” is perhaps a more expressive term.
²⁶
Jefferson struggled with the race-slavery issue all his life, and summed up his perception in 1820: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
²⁷
He also succinctly spelled out the roots of our struggle with the “wolf” in his last letter before his death on July 4, 1826. These words, too, still shape the American psyche. Jefferson was too ill to come to Washington to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As he looked back over the half century, he was pleased that the sentiments in the Declaration still commanded the allegiance of his countrymen. He believed that the Declaration continued to be:

the signal arousing men to…the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.
²⁸

The first American revolution protected slavery; the second—the Civil War—destroyed it, but exposed a racism that maintained the subordination of black people. The third revolution—the post-World War II revolution—seeks substantive opportunity. All of these revolutions involved questions of race and equality. The difficulties in this, our national project, are enormous and confusing, and the results uncertain. As Lincoln said, “We simply must begin with and mold from disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we…differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and measure of reconstruction.” The contemporary concern about affirmative action and reverse discrimination continues the American passion to pursue the relation between liberty and equality which began in Philadelphia in September, 1774. We still struggle with the wolf.

The curtain of history can be raised to illuminate the agreement to protect slavery in September, 1774, when representatives of the North and South first met. Without that agreement, there would have been no union of North and South. British power might well have overwhelmed those who sought freedom. But the agreement made in 1774 was amended in 1787 to divide the nation. The division was made to last as long as the political, economic, and social forces permitted. The framers in Philadelphia understood that the future of the nation would be influenced by growth to the west, and they considered that restricting slavery to the lands south of the Ohio was essential for the union to hold together. They could not know that their compromises toward the end of the eighteenth century would lead a president eighty years later to conclude that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
²⁹
Lincoln led the Civil War to end the institution that had been largely responsible for the birth of the nation.

It is wrong to impute ultimate wisdom to the framers of our country’s political system. Theirs was the wisdom of time and place, and their concepts of individual freedom and religious liberty, rooted in an agricultural economy and sustained on the backs of slaves, were of great value. Their world was built on an optimistic assumption; that their successors would deal with the world that they faced with the same conviction and willingness to compromise that they had shown. What is significant about their original intent is the willingness to compromise to achieve basic and important objectives in the shadow of well-recognized realities and to trust much to the future judgment of our people. This is the defining characteristic of our collective drama.

The notion that these leaders—who had lived in their lifetimes under at least four different governments—wished to freeze the concepts they developed in the hurly-burly of current events is nonsense. What they expected of successive generations was that the inheritors of the system of freedom and democracy that they built would act with as much wisdom for their own time as they had shown in shepherding the nation into being. The Constitution was not created to be a straightjacket; it is a framework for a living engagement with the contemporary problems.

Our nation was born partly to protect race slavery, and grew to maturity with a decision to limit that slavery. We have a collective responsibility to view this history from our own perspective. While personal guilt is not in question, personal responsibility for the condition of people of color continues. Whites are the beneficiaries of the totality of the decisions made by our founders. Where, in the light of more modern views, they erred, we have the same obligation they assumed; to build in our time a society that better accords with our fundamental values than the one that we inherited.