The American Founders and Slavery

Below are their views on slavery, of the seven most influential Founding Fathers:

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Washington was born at a time when slavery had yet to be questioned anywhere in the colonies.  As a young man, he was a tough task master, but as he grew older he began to change.  Whippings stopped.  He encouraged marriage among slaves, and to keep families together resolved not to sell or trade slaves without their consent. Since consent was rarely given, the General found himself with a growing economic liability--a work force larger than he could employ profitably.  The problem was partly due to the high-birth rate among Mount Vernon slaves and partly because he switched from growing tobacco to growing wheat and barley which required fewer workers.  Most Virginia planters, when overstocked or in need of quick cash, sold a few slaves.  Washington would not.

As commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, Washington spent eight years in the North where slaves were fewer and gradual emancipation was underway.  At first, he was shocked to find free blacks serving in The Continental Army.  As the war dragged on and enlistment fell off, he urged more slaves to be enlisted with the promise of freedom at war’s end.  As a result, the Continental Army was the most racially integrated American fighting force until the Vietnam War.  Being in the North for so long, Washington began to see the advantage of free labor, manufacturing, and financial credit, and to question the very economics of slavery.  While in Philadelphia over the winter of 1778-79, he seriously considered selling his slaves and using the proceeds as investment capital.

After the Revolution, Washington returned to life as a Virginia planter intent on making Mount Vernon profitable again.  He acknowledged that slavery was evil but he didn’t see a way of running his large plantation without it.  One reason slavery was losing its hold in the North was the endless supply of free labor arriving daily at docks in cities like Boston and Philadelphia and especially New York City.  The only labor force entering the South was enslaved Africans.

Washington decided the best he could manage was to free his own slaves upon his death.  To prepare them for freedom, he intended to have them taught to read-and-write, only to discover Virginia had passed a law making it illegal to educate African-Americans. In private, Washington was increasingly frustrated with the attitude of his fellow Virginians toward slavery.  Should the nation divide along north-south lines, Washington told friends he would side with the North.

JAMES MADISON

The man from Orange County, Virginia seemed to be forever in the middle of two opposing political forces.  James Madison was both a nationalist and a Virginian, which were about as compatible as cats and dogs.

Over the winter of 1790, Madison was forced to choose, and he chose to side with his home state, which meant turning his back on the nationalist vision he shared with Hamilton and George Washinton, and siding with a narrow states’ rights agenda that included slavery.  The decision would prove irrevocable. Madison would go to his grave as a slave owner.

Madison, like Jefferson, Washington, George Mason, and other liberal-minded Virginians, believed slavery was immoral and inconsistent with the ideals of the revolution.  In 1783, as Madison was preparing to return home from Philadelphia after living four years in the North, he learned his slave Billey had become “too thoroughly tainted to be fit companion for fellow slaves in Virginia.”  The usual practice with slaves who resisted returning to the life of a plantation as a slave, was to ship them off to the West Indies.  It was cruelty in the extreme, as West Indian slaves were literary worked to death.  Madison could not bring himself to do this.  Instead, he sold Billey in Philadelphia, where he would be set free in seven years.  In a letter to his father, Madison explained his actions: why should Billey be punished “merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be right, and worthy the pursuit, of every human being?”

As with Washington, time living in the North had changed Madison’s view and he had trouble readjusting to life on a Virginian plantation.  The cruelty and injustice of the slave system so affronted him that he studied law and invested in land speculation as a means of earning a living by other means.  It didn’t work.  He never practiced law and he failed as a land speculator.  So Madison returned to elected office.  Politics didn’t pay well but for extended periods it did keep him away from the evils of his father’s slave plantation.

In 1785, as a member of the Virginia Assembly, Madison spoke in favor of a bill (drafted by his friend Thomas Jefferson) that called for the gradual abolition of slavery.  Reaction to the bill in Virginia was so volatile that Madison gave up all hope of abolishing slavery in his lifetime.  To get elected and to have influence in his state, meant being silent on the slavery issue.  Madison’s only consolation was to tell himself that eventually slavery would fade away in the South as it was doing in the North.  It was wishful thinking.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

Born an outcast on a tiny Caribbean island, Alexander Hamilton had little trouble identifying with slaves.  As a bastard, he couldn’t attend a christian school.  When he was nine, his father left never to return, and when he was eleven his mother died.  At age twelve, he was put to work in the service of others.  Because he had a head for math, he was made a clerk in a counting house (his older brother James was made a carpenter’s apprentice).  A life of “grov’ling” (as he put it) was not what he had in mind for himself.  He read Plutarch’s “Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans” and dreamed of one day being famous as a nation-founder.

Hamilton saw African slaves arrive daily at the docks in St. Croix, be whipped into submission and be herded like cattle to the sugarcane fields.  Many died from the unrelenting heat and intolerable working conditions.  Being white, Hamilton knew he had a slim chance of breaking free of a life of drudgery, which he managed to do, while slaves had absolutely no chance of regaining their freedom.

As an officer in Washington’s army, Hamilton advocated the enlistment of African slaves as soldiers with the promise of freedom at war’s end.  “I have not the least doubt the (N)egroes will make very excellent soldiers,” he wrote to John Jay.  How did he assess their innate abilities?  At a time when Jefferson questioned the mental and moral abilities of blacks, and speculated in writing about their inferiority, Hamilton wrote, “For their natural faculties are as good as ours.”

When the war ended, northern abolitionists began pointing out the contradiction of a revolution for freedom fought by a society that tolerated slavery.  “It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me,” wrote Abigail Adams in a letter to her husband John, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

Hamilton never owned slaves, and was among more than thirty New Yorkers who, in January 1785, formed the New York Manumission Society.  Paradoxically, many members were themselves slaveholders.  They rejected a resolution that Hamilton supported, requiring members to free their slaves.  Nonetheless, over the next decade the Society worked to make slavery illegal in New York and to protect free blacks from being illegally taken into slavery.

JOHN JAY

As president of the New York Manumission Society, John Jay advocated gradual emancipation and apparently decided such a policy applied to himself.  The few slaves he did own--five in all--were not manumitted until late in his life.

By all accounts, Jay was a benevolent master.  To a fellow slaveholder he wrote: “Providence has placed these persons in stations below us.  They are servants but they are men; and kindness to inferiors more strongly indicates magnanimity than meanness.” To an antislavery friend in England he wrote that it was “very inconsistent as well as unjust and perhaps impious” for men to “pray and fight for their own freedom” and yet to “keep others in slavery.”

Jay drafted a petition for the Manumission Society arguing for legislation that would prohibit the export of blacks or slaves from New York. “It is well known,” he argued, “that the condition of slaves in this state is far more tolerable and easy than in many other countries” (i.e. southern states).  While the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia in 1787, he drafted another petition, this time to urge the new federal constitution to prohibit the import of slaves into the country.  The timing wasn’t good as delegates already had decided to remain silent on the issue, and the petition was not submitted.

Within a few years of its formation, the New York Manumission Society opened a school for free blacks, and over the next few decades this school and others sponsored by the society educated more than two thousand African Americans.  Many of the graduates went on to become leaders of the black community and leaders of the abolition movement.  While Jay was governor of New York (1795-1801), the state passed legislation to end slavery which took many years to implement.  It wasn’t until 1827 that slaves were given freedom in New York.

JOHN ADAMS

John Adams never owned slaves, nor hired the slaves of others to work his farm, as was sometimes done in New England.  Honest John chopped his own wood, planted and harvested his own fields, and rose to prominence as a savvy Boston attorney.

Despite being against “the peculiar institution,” Adams appeared in several slave cases--for the master, never the slave.  It was in keeping with his character to represent those with whom he disagreed, if they had a worthy case.  He defended the commanding officer of the British regiment that fired on patriots in the Boston Massacre, and got him acquitted.

Adams was sent to Philadelphia to represent Massachusetts as a delegate to the Continental Congress.  As a persuasive and indefatigable speaker, he could talk a reluctant Congress into declaring independence from England, but he could not talk southern delegates into giving up their slaves.

In throwing off the yoke of monarchy, the colonists were attempting to create the world anew.  Someone needed to explain it.  Adams picked a brilliant young southerner with a flair for writing to find the right words.  Possessing a “canine appetite” for books, Thomas Jefferson had little trouble finding the words that went to the very heart of the issue:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

And,

“. . . when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for the future security.”

Jefferson’s initial draft included passages that called slavery into question, passages that were struck out by the delegation-at-large.  Indeed, the biggest stumbling block to independence was slavery.  The South would not compromise.  The South would have its slaves without condition, or there would be no revolution.

Adams, like all northern delegates, was not about to let southern slavery jeopardize the larger purpose, which was independence.  Yes, Adams was against slavery but going forward he would speak not of abolition but of gradual emancipation.  Gradual emancipation was underway in the North and nowhere was that more evident than in Philadelphia, where Congress was meeting.  No doubt, such evidence convinced delegates that the same thing would happen south of the Mason-Dixon Line--eventually.  Among the next generation of leaders, John Calhoun would speak of slavery as “the scaffolding for the South,” support that would be removed, “when the work was done.”

“Gradual emancipation” proved to be magical words that brought unity to the Continental Congress and ultimately independence from England.  The very idea of gradual emancipation allowed slave owners north and south to live with their hypocrisy.  Not everyone was taken in.  In London, Samuel Johnson asked: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Among the great Congressional orators of 1776, Thomas Jefferson was an anomaly: he was shy and had trouble expressing himself.  Adams recalled that “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” What Jefferson lacked in speaking skills, however, he more than made up in writing skills.  When it was time to draft the Declaration of Independence, the choice came down to two people: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Adams was himself an excellent writer but acknowledged that Jefferson was better, so the task fell to the shy Virginian.

It took Jefferson two days to write the first draft.  Adams and Benjamin Franklin made a few stylistic changes then the document went before Congress.  It was a painful ordeal for Jefferson to sit through as approximately one-fourth of what he had written was crossed out.  While he didn’t breathe a word of protest, he lamented the changes for the rest of life.  Congress had “mangled” his manuscript.

Jefferson’s preamble with its ringing endorsement of universal equality--the part everyone remembers--was left intact.  The cuts were to the parts no one remembers: the lengthy bill of indictment against King George III, chief of which was the long passage in which Jefferson blamed the King for slavery and the slave trade.  As emphatic a passage as any, it was to have been the climax of all the charges made against the king.  The passage was removed, Jefferson said later, mainly because South Carolina and Georgia objected.  While it condemned slavery as evil, Jefferson’s concluding passage stopped short of endorsing outright abolition.  Be that as it may, the passage proved controversial and was stricken out.  The preamble was allowed to stand, which would become holy scripture for human rights advocates the world over.

While Jefferson was against slavery, like other southern planters he wasn’t prepared to release his slaves from bondage.  He was counting on gradual emancipation to somehow solve the problem for him.  What no one seems to have considered at the time was the vastly greater number of slaves living in the South as opposed to the North, and that the South--particularly the Deep South--was still importing African slaves while the northern workforce was filling its ranks with immigrant European free labor.

Years later, when it was clear that southern slavery was not fading away but spreading into the western territories, Jefferson grew alarmed.  In his final years, it awoke him “like a fire bell in the night,” filling him with terror.  He believed the two races could not live together in harmony.  Once freed, Jefferson believed former slaves would  take revenge on their former masters.  “We have the wolf by the ears,” he complained, “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

Jefferson was not a party to the Slavery (Un)Resolution of 1790 but he would have agreed that silence was the only way of preserving the fragile union.  Like the other five, he too believed slavery was morally wrong and would eventually die out, so why risk everything they had struggled to achieve over an issue that was doomed anyway?

FINAL WORD

The founders knew well that the slavery question if left unaddressed might be the ruin of their beloved republic.  Never did they dream, however, that by avoiding the issue they were condemning 600,000 yet unborn citizens to die in a war that one day would bring closure to “the peculiar institution.”  By remaining silent that is, in fact, what they were doing.

For more, read my book, Washington in New York

- END -